The Cougar Lounge - June In January

"When things aren't going your way, you need to take the next step and move forward."

- Wazzu women's hoop head coach June Daugherty after the Cougars played a mostly good first half against rival Washington but then came out flat in the second half.

"Keith Jackson will always be the Rose Bowl to a lot of fans."

- 2009 ABC Rose Bowl announcer Brent Musburger stating the facts, ma'am.

"I was going to get the penalty called on us just so we could get a penalty called on us for having too much fun, but I forgot."

- USC head football coach Pete Carroll claiming that an unnamed football executive called the Rose Bowl game officials at halftime of the Trojans' demolition of Penn State to try and get them to hit USC with a 15-yard penalty for excessive celebrations on their own sideline.

"I can't stand an actor or actress who tells me acting is hard work. It's easy work. Anyone who says it isn't, never had to stand on his feet all day dealing blackjack."

- Deceased actor…well…okay, actor-singer…well, okay…entertainer…well, okay…buddy of Frank Sinatra and card-carrying Rat Pack member, Dean Martin.

There is a cadaverous look to 2008. The only reason that the Lounge cannot be more certain about that is due to the fact that we spent the last portion of the year embedded in a snow bank. Some people are still buried in the stuff. When there is a metric ton of snow lying around, there are only a limited amount of activities one can do in these conditions – driving is typically not one of them. Drinking nog is definitely one of them. So is Snowzilla. But those are the pros. Most of us are just snowy amateurs, which is okay, until the aforementioned metric ton of snow arrives on the doorstep and blocks the door. Of course, there are ways around this. Going to Hawai'i, as the Wazzu football team and women's hoop team did - during any part of the holiday season will help alleviate some of the snow-filled angst. Fond memories of luaus, snorkeling and warm, tropical breezes can at least claim a few minutes back from a day overrun by the whine of snowblowers or rumble of snow plows – just thinking of June in January will help a person's sanity.

2008 was the Year of the Rat in the Chinese calendar and while that roughly translates to wealth, there is always that underlying current of doubt about how the rat attained that wealth in the first place. Rats do not have good names in either the animal or human worlds and thus, skepticism abounds. Sure enough, in the final quarter of the year, wealth – and those who had attained it via greedy methods - was taking massive hits to the solar plexus. Fortunately, the Year of the Ox is upon us and that means prosperity through hard work. Ah, now that is a different type of wealth. That is the wealth most people who are not dictators of countries, silver spoon sippers or bon vivants may relate to. Whereas the rat takes whatever it can get using crafty methodology, the ox is there, day after day, plowing through the problems of the day. Welcome to the Year of the Ox and plowing through the snow of 2008.

But before we bid our final farewells to 2008, the Lounge would like to take a moment of montage, like they do at the Academy Awards, to recognize a few names of those who left us to push up daisies. We call the Lounge montage the Big 10 and we have 11 names but our stationery logo has an 11 in it just like they do in the real Big 11. The Lounge's Big 10 that we could not have imagined life on Earth without their contributions to it are as follows: Ollie Johnston - one of the original Disney animators, Betty James - co-inventor of the Slinky, George Carlin - comedian extraordinaire [a word he would most definitely lambaste], Richard Knerr - co-founder of Wham-O [you may recognize some of their toys – the hula hoop and Frisbee], Suzanne Pleshette - ah, so many games of "Bob"…sigh, Irvine Robbins - ever hear of Baskin-Robbins?, Dick Martin - co-creator of Laugh-In, a sort of Americanized version of Monty Python, Harvey Korman - comedian who was a regular on the Carol Burnett Show and in numerous Disney movies but whose best role as far as the Lounge is concerned was as "Hedley Lamarr" in Blazing Saddles, Jim McKay - who will forever be associated with "the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat" and the dude crashing off the ski jump in the opening film clip montage of ABC's now-defunct Wide World of Sports, Paul Newman - so many fine films to choose from, it is too difficult to single out a winner from the pack [though we lean heavily toward The Sting,] and Isaac Hayes - "…That Shaft, he's a bad mutha…shut yer mouth!"

Naturally, the Lounge would have liked to add the BCS Taliban to the list of deaths in 2008 and if we had our way, the BCS Taliban would have died like this - with Roy Kramer playing the role of the man wanting to have lunch. The Pac-10 went 5-0 in what everybody thought was a down year but because of some of the rag-tag opponents the teams were forced to face [Miami, Pitt] there is no way to determine conference supremacy in anything short of a playoff. A 16-team playoff this year using the AP Top 25 rankings would have resulted in these first round match-ups: [1] Florida v. [16] Georgia, [2] Oklahoma v. [15] Oregon, [3] Texas v. [14] Georgia Tech, [4]Alabama v. [13] Oklahoma State, [5] USC v. [12] Cincinnati, [6] Penn State v. [11] TCU, [7] Utah v. [10] Ohio State and [8] Texas Tech v. [9] Boise State. Based on what we have already seen in bowl games so far, Oregon certainly would have given Oklahoma a run for their money and provided an entertaining game before losing, Alabama might have lost to OK State, USC would have pounded Cincy into an unrecognizable pulp, TCU probably could have beaten Penn State, Utah would have beaten Ohio State and who knows who would win between Texas Tech and Boise State but can anyone deny how fun that game would have been to watch? In the quarterfinals, USC would have smushed OK State and there would have been two games to die for – Oklahoma-Utah, Texas-TCU. Think there might be some drama in that Texas-TCU game? Then the semi-finals have a potential match-up of Florida-Oklahoma on one side and USC-Texas on the other side. Doesn't matter who wins those games, really, but a potential USC-Florida or USC-Oklahoma match-up in the championship game would have been legendary. No wonder USC is mad and Pete Carroll wants a playoff.

"Why is it taking so long for this team to gel?" asks an impatient Coach Burberry about the Wazzu men's hoop team and whose shoes are laced with irony.

Well, Coach, it is the same thing pretty much everybody already has heard before – youth. Youth is a killer in the Pac-10 and combined with the fact that this particular youth must not only learn the Bennett system of basketball but also execute it near-flawlessly for 40 minutes against the better teams they face this year and you can understand what the Cougars are up against. It is unrealistic to expect a team so youthful to maintain near-perfect execution throughout the course of the season, much less against the caliber of opponents they typically see in the Pac-10. So the key question here is not "why" but more along the lines of "how long will it take" before the team begins to see consistent performances from both their veterans and newbies. So far, the results are as to be expected – losses against the good teams and wins over the not-so-good teams – with sporadic stretches of goodness against those good teams [38 minutes against LSU, 35 against Baylor, 30 against Pitt, 20 against Gonzaga and Washington]. But none of those are 40 minutes and – not coincidentally – none of those are wins. The expectation is that the youth will begin to turn the corner in the second conference go-round in February but they cannot dig themselves a hole that is too deep in January. The Cougars will have to increase those amounts to 40 minutes against the good teams of the Pac-10 – such as California and Stanford – or else risk losing their NCAA bubble chance and perhaps even their NIT chances. Losing at home in conference play will cost them dearly come Big Dance bubble time and the bad timing of the students being on break coinciding with the first three conference games of the season will hurt their attendance numerals for NIT purposes. For the Cougars, the margin of error keeps getting slimmer with every passing week.

"I think the women will be strong next year," says Lola Peppers about the women's hoop program.

Yes, Lola, that mirrors the Lounge consensus. Asking the women's hoop program to turn itself into a post-season contender in the space of two years when history suggests more time is necessary is not a realistic goal. This year, coming off the typical first year that all Wazzu women's hoop head coaches have had to endure throughout the march of time, there was expected to be some improvement and that has happened – the team has already won more non-conference games than they had in 14 years. The team, like the men, also has a ton of youth and, like the men, are not getting the full 40 minutes of consistency they will need to get a bevy of Pac-10 wins. They have spurts of goodness – such as 3/4ths of the game against Kansas State and half the game against Washington – but will need to ramp that up to 100% if they are going to get a few more Pac-10 wins this year than last year [two]. However, head coach June Daugherty has clearly established a foundation for the turnaround to occur next year. The team plays at a high energy level and has enough athleticism to deal with most of the teams they will face. All they need now is more experience and in 2009-10, they can legitimately begin to start expecting a reasonable shot at post-season play.

The first week of 2009 is officially upon us and the Lounge would be remiss – as well as foolish – if we did not alert everyone to the presence of YouTube Reviewed. The good thing about YouTube is that it has many funny clips for a variety of tastes – the bad thing is trying to figure out just where all those clips are without relying on your cool friends to stay up until three in the morning forwarding them to you. That all changes with YTR. They are your official 3am cool friend and to prove it – they have the classic Lonely Island clip "Just Two Guyz Who Like Sportz" loaded in just in time for the new year. Put that in with the rest of the 2009 Oxen.

As 2009 begins, the Lounge Scientists are slowly getting over their foul mood stemming from not being able to name scientific names with cool Greek deity names and that is because they made a new year resolution to hang out with the happy scientists – a decision which, of course, was backed up by a scientific study showing that the friends of friends can affect a person's behavior just as much as other external factors like weather, politics and sports. Choose to hang around happy people and chances are that you will be a happy camper too [though George Carlin never liked that phrase].

"Most people will not be surprised that people with more friends are happier, but what really matters is whether those friends are happy," says Lounge Scientist #38, Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard, who reputedly was extremely happy about finishing this report.

So long 2008, here is to hoping the next time the Year of the Rat rolls around, it takes the BCS Taliban with it – then everyone will surely be happy.

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