Blanchette: Shock leave odor with latest defeat

Here’s some Sports Marketing 101: Happy history makes for a useful – if fleeting – distraction from an unpleasant present.

(Refer to your textbooks for the roughly two dozen times the Seattle Mariners have trotted out Edgar Martinez for some sort of ceremony over the past decade.)

Now, it was nothing but a coincidence that the Spokane Shock chose Saturday’s halftime to celebrate the good old days of indoor football with the club’s first jersey retirement. The Shock turn 10 this year and, yes, some homage must be paid. And no more worthy an honoree could there be than Raul Vijil, the jitterbug receiver whose unlikely stardom ran parallel with the unlikely runaway success of the franchise itself.

While we’re on the subject of probability, it’s unlikely the Shock could summon a poorer accounting of themselves than they did around Vijil’s big night.

Ponder this: San Jose 83, Spokane 28.

And you thought the rodeo left an odor in the Arena.

It is, you might figure, the worst beatdown in Shock history, but that’s just the set up to this punch line:

By three touchdowns.

The silver lining? Sucking that bad can’t be anything but a team effort. So the Shock have that going for them.

Coach Andy Olson was suitably apoplectic.

“I’ve never been part of a worse game as a player or coach,” he raged. “I’m flat-out embarrassed as the head coach of this team right now. I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but it’s the truth. … I’m embarrassed. It won’t happen again, and if it does I deserve to be canned.”

With a 2-5 start to the season, that thistle has already poked up through the dirt. It’s just not usually the gardener’s place to suggest that Option A might be a new gardener.

What the wipeout did was take to a cartoonish extreme the idea which offered itself up even before the game that not just the Shock season, but the Shock franchise has found itself at a crossroads – staring this night at both its past and its future.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this was dismissed before the game by owner Nader Naini, who insisted that “I feel like we’re doing just fine.”

Except that attendance continues to slide – it’s down 20 percent from the 2010 championship year, and the announced audience of 7,519 on Saturday was the lowest regular-season gate in Shock history (and on a night when, in addition to Vijil’s jersey, they hoisted a No. 9 in the rafters to honor the 9th Man).

And except that at the moment it’s pretty clear that the team has never had less of a grasp on how to win.

Two things provided a stark contrast to the way things used to be: the Vijil retrospective and the presence in the building of the Shock’s starting quarterback of the previous two years, Erik Meyer – now in the employ of the Sabercats, though he didn’t play for the second straight game while recovering from an injury.

The Meyer business – he signed with San Jose in the offseason – is a particularly sore point with Naini, who purchased the team after the 2013 season and got a quick indoctrination in the free-for-all of Arena Football League free agency and what he calls “the cheating that goes on that needs to stop.”

He means in the area of financial, uh, incentives that go beyond what’s allowable by league rule.

“I’ll be frank – our quarterback went somewhere because he had opportunities that are far in excess of what they should have been,” Naini said. “I don’t think it’s because San Jose is such a great place to live, or the cost of living. You tell me. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.”

If this sounds like a particularly sour strain of grapes, Naini has found a cadre of fellow owners who share the feeling. It’s how he was able to push for a long overdue change in AFL’s leadership, and even get the league to hire a transactions cop.

“Most of the franchises have bought into the concept that parity is not a bad thing,” he said. “Part and parcel of that is making sure there’s a level playing field.”

Naini thinks some of the things that ail the Shock – he pins some of the attendance seepage on roster churn of fan favorites – are rooted at the league level. Not just unpoliced signing rules, but untapped revenues (the AFL pays for its national TV airtime) and the lack of a focused marketing plan.

And then there’s the notion that the club isn’t long for Spokane.

“I can’t tell you how many fans have stopped me in the (concourse) to ask if I’m going to move the team,” he said. “We’re not going to move the team. It’s either going to succeed or fail in Spokane, period – and it’s going to succeed.”

History would say he’s right. The present, however, isn’t so sure.