Advertisement
football Edit

The Cougar Lounge - The Mustache Of Speech

"They're the best-looking football team I've seen in this conference this year, period. [Oregon head football coach] Chip Kelly told me he thought they were."
- Wazzu head football coach Paul Wulff talking about how good-looking Cal was. Wait, maybe him and Chip meant it another way…but they were in San Francisco, after all…..
Advertisement
"We will get there and we are working on it but we will see the same thing on Sunday so hopefully we can adapt and do a better job."
- Wazzu head volleyball coach Jen Greeny after the Cougars were squashed/swept by USC and expecting more of the same medicine today against UCLA.
"Basically, I was lied to."
- USC head football coach Lane Kiffin who threw a temper tantrum after the loss to Stanford for not being allowed to have a timeout during the waning seconds of regulation in the game. The Lounge suspects it is not the first time Kiffin has thought he has been lied to.
"In hockey, they've expanded to 400 teams, including 50 in cities with no ice. In soccer, 90,000 fans in Buenos Aires killed each other in a victory celebration."
- Sportscaster Biff Barf [otherwise known as one of comedian George Carlin's many characters - seven of whom you cannot see on television].
The Lounge has officially proclaimed the emancipation of thoughts for all Wazzu fans and well-wishers after the Cougar football team endured their fifth loss in a row - this time with California crushing the Cougars into an unrecognizable pulp in San Francisco. That means that all Wazzu fans and well-wishers - even those who have been holding back waiting to see if there would genuinely be any change from the last three years' worth of Cougar football - may now speak their minds about the state of the Cougar football program and where it will go in the future [perhaps as quickly as a week from now] when a new coach is eventually hired to replace the current head coach. But first, we have the results from last month's new entertainment show - The Blame Game! Yes, that's right, where lucky contestants were allowed to assemble and answer who, exactly, is to blame for the poor fortunes during the four years under Wulff so far. The correct answers were….drum roll, please….for Year One - former head coach Bill Doba! [cue crowd clap track here]. For Year Two - those no-good character players as well as those with no talent! [especially the ones not recruited by Wulff]. For Year Three - the Wazzu fans and well-wishers themselves! Finally, for Year Four - all of the above plus all the stupid fans not smart enough to give blindly in support of the current model! The one lucky winner will be allowed to pick from one of three prizes - a blow on the head, a kick in the teeth or a punch in the throat - assuming they have not endured those already after the past four years of watching Cougar football.
With five straight losses in football, the head coaching hiring derby - Wazzu version - may now begin and while the Lounge Emancipation Proclamation has technically freed the sycophantic slaves of their devotion to losing football, it does not, by any means, mean there is a consensus on which coach Wazzu athletic director Bill Moos should pursue to replace Wulff. There are many candidates available for the taking and with Pac-12 television revenue moolah coming into the coffers next year, Wazzu is in a better position to pursue a good coach than they were when Wulff was originally hired. Although Arizona has got the jump on the best candidates by already firing their head coach, Wazzu can move up to the second spot in the West after UCLA upset Arizona State this weekend, preserving - at worst - at least a few more weeks for Bruins' head coach Rick Neuheisel.
The Lounge would now like to move on to the more important news of the week - the Wazzu soccer team putting themselves in position for yet another NCAA tournament berth with their tie against the rival Washington Huskies last week. Wazzu finished in fourth place in the inaugural season of Pac-12 conference play and that should be good enough to get the Cougars in for their third NCAA Tournament berth in the last four years - we will know by tomorrow afternoon when the NCAA Selection Show runs at 1:30PM on NCAA.com.
"I don't like it going down to the wire like this - is there anything you can do about that?" says V. de Milo, after the Wazzu soccer team tied the Huskies to put their fate in the hands of the NCAA selection committee.
Well, the Lounge does plan on blaming Bill Doba if Wazzu does not get selected - will that help? Seriously, the vast majority of the Lounge clientele feels Wazzu has made its case - and a substantial one at that - for inclusion in the NCAA Tournament. They have only two bad losses [to Portland and Oregon] and the remainder of their losses were to higher ranked teams - three of which were on the road. In fact, five of their six losses were road losses, with a close 1-0 loss to top-ranked Stanford being the only blemish at Cougarland this year. Needless to say, Wazzu has done enough to be in the NCAA Tournament. The more important element of last week's match was the fact that Wazzu head coach Matt Potter is an astonishing 5-0-3 in his last eight meetings against the rival Washington Huskies - better than any current Cougar head coach's record against the Huskies and better than any Cougar head coach in any sport since John Chaplin and Rick Sloan were regularly beating up on the Husky track and field teams in the 1980s and 90s. In fact, Potter has only lost one time to the Huskies - ever - and that was in his first year as a head coach. Since then - no soccer soup for you, Huskies!
"What the hell happened this year?" exclaims Old Bean, about the Cougar football team's latest sour soap opera episodic turn.
The Lounge would like to answer that question firstly, in our normal voice and then in a kind of silly, high-pitched whine. Well, where should we begin, OB? Probably the first place to start is the head coach - but many other people are already in that boat. After that, there is a talent issue - aside from receiver Marquess Wilson and sometimes, receiver Jared Karstetter and sometimes Jeff Tuel [especially if you are named Oregon State], there is not much opposing teams have to fear from the Cougars taking the field. Third is the schedule, which created a false sense of security that the corner was somehow being turned with wins over Idaho State [current Sagarin ranking of 207], UNLV [144] and Colorado [130]. In fact, if the Pac-12 had not been created this year, the Cougars would again be sitting at the bottom of the standings with only three weeks remaining - and that is without having to play USC! As it stands, the Cougars were lucky Colorado became a conference member [sort of] this year. Fourth - Moos and Wazzu itself for getting in bed with Nike and allowing them to perpetrate those horrendous all-Gray uniforms that resulted in two blowout losses. Now, it is merely a matter of waiting until Moos makes the official announcement to see where this soap opera will turn from here.
Naturally, Lounge can understand the yearning of the clientele for the days of yore when there was good football being played on the Palouse and those days were mostly in the late 1990s and early Aughts. Wazzu quarterback Ryan Leaf led the Cougars to their first Rose Bowl in 67 years and now Wazzu fans and well-wishers can live those years - years when they beat USC and Oregon and Stanford and Washington and, yes, even UCLA - vicariously with his new book 596 Switch. The Lounge recommends holding the book close to your chest and swooning from side to side - many members of the clientele report this helps in response to watching this season.
This week, the Lounge Scientists will be monitoring Asteroid YU55 to see if it has any chance of hitting the Earth and taking out the entire Arizona State football team before they arrive in Pullman, sure to be mad as hell at having been upset at UCLA and Neuheisel. But alas, it appears the asteroid will come close to hitting the Earth on Tuesday but not close enough to alter the fate of ASU's football team since close is currently being defined as 201,700 miles. Not close and no cigar.
"We know exactly where it is going to be and we don't have any chance of impact for the following 100 years," says Lounge Scientist #55 Marina Brozovic, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and who, reportedly, has a pet asteroid instead of a pet rock.
Scientists will now look into the possibility of having the asteroid hit the Washington Huskies before the arrival of the Apple Cup.
+++++++sponsored by Giant Release+++++++++
Attention COUGAR fans and well-wishers! The 2011-12 athletic season is almost here and advertisers are like quarterbacks - how would you like to be the quarterback who threw the game-winning pass that was caught by 30+ million unduplicated consumers in the youth 12-17 and male 18-49 demographic markets through an integrated partnership that offers entrance to top web portals? You are no dummy, so of course you would. Website owners are like the receivers who, in collaboration with their experienced online media veteran teammates at online media consultancy Giant Release, can help make that diving touchdown catch to win the game. The quarterbacks at GR can provide the advantages your website is seeking during this upcoming athletic season with their exclusive selection of genre-specific top-tier games, entertainment, male lifestyle, action and college sports content. The season is about to begin, don't to be a benchwarmer.
Advertisement