Hill should have a ball as a senior

Just for the record, Jason Hill won’t be taking ballroom dancing next fall at Washington State.

He can’t. It’s not in the course catalog. There is something called “American Social Dance,” which figures to be the same thing, although most of the American social dancing done at clubs these days seems to be cribbed from the Spice Channel.

So this is not a Matt Leinart deal.

You’ll remember that Leinart, the most famous collegiate ballroom dancer in the country and the second-best college quarterback, passed on the opportunity to join the National Football League and the 35 percent tax bracket so he could hang for another year with his boys at USC, take two credits of cha-cha-cha to finish off a degree and win another national championship.

Well, two out of three ain’t bad.

In revealing his decision – and the rationale behind it – to return to Wazzu for his senior year and not declare for the NFL draft, Jason Hill couldn’t have been more candid on Friday afternoon, a bit of a departure from the last couple times the Cougs had to wade through this sort of drama.

It’s not because he loves the Cougars, though he does.

It’s not because he is determined to get his degree, although he is and he will.

It’s not because he wants to win a national championship, although he insisted that “We have to get to a bowl game.”

It’s because the NFL didn’t want him enough.

Oh, they would have taken him and he would have made it. The evaluation he requested from the league’s central scouting service projected him as a late-third/early-fourth round pick, and that’s not exactly a snub. Of the 72 players selected in the third and fourth rounds of last year’s draft, 70 of them stuck and a bunch started. The first wide receiver picked in the fourth round, Hampton’s Jerome Mathis, caught a few balls for Houston and was second in the league in kickoff returns, just as a for-instance.

(One of the two who didn’t make it, of course, was Maurice Clarett, but he already seems to have a thriving second career as a punchline.)

But in the end, Hill made a remarkably mature analysis of just what the NFL is to a player and when it’s prudent to be seduced by this siren – and when it isn’t.

The NFL? It’s Hill’s dream. “All my life I’ve worked to play in the NFL,” he admitted.

But dreams deferred are not dead.

And then there’s the payday, which when deferred is likely as not to be enhanced.

Naturally, we’re excluding from that generalization the three marquee Cougar quarterbacks – Timm Rosenbach, Drew Bledsoe and Ryan Leaf – who jumped after their junior seasons to expected riches. We’ll also exempt the bizarre case of receiver Philip Bobo, who decided to take the plunge with Bledsoe with no realistic hope of getting drafted at all.

Between those extremes have been Hill, defensive tackle Rien Long and receiver Devard Darling – all of whom WSU head coach Bill Doba tried to persuade to wait, counseling they would lose money by coming out early.

“The only thing you can count on is the signing bonus,” Doba said, noting that NFL contracts do not come with guarantees. “The rest you have to make (by making) the team. The higher the round you can be drafted, the higher the signing bonus. And you can put that in your pocket.”

But Darling was determined to go no matter what the round – it turned out to be third. Long, having announced that he was coming back, got his head turned at the Outland Trophy presentation and wound up costing himself, in all probability, $2 million to $3 million as a fourth-rounder when he’d likely have landed in the first round a year later.

“You want a player to stay for the team and everything,” Doba said, “but we’re in this business for people. We want to do right by kids and see them do the right thing. If the report had come back saying Jason was likely to go in the first round, I’d hold the door for him. The last guy signed in the first round last year got about $5 million, and it starts to drop considerably in the middle of the second round.”

There is no guarantee, of course, that Jason Hill will go in the first round next year. But he figures to get stronger, maybe faster – and as brilliant as he could be at times this season, he’s likely to be a more consistent pass catcher and better route runner, as well.

Doba also likes to invoke this bit of wisdom.

“Jason’s only 20 years old,” he said. “Every player from here I’ve talked to who’s in the NFL, they don’t like it. They like the money, but it’s a business, a job. But playing the game is not the same as it is in college. This is the last year he’ll have to have fun playing football.”

That does play to the fan’s warm-and-fuzzy thinking that Hill’s return is an endorsement of all things crimson-and-gray – not unlike, say, the Gonzaga fan’s delusion that Adam Morrison will become college basketball’s Leinart because of some intangible Zag quality or desire to further enhance a legend.

And there’s no harm in thinking that, but it’s mostly irrelevant.

For if Hill is grounded enough not to be overwhelmed by the needs of his family – not an insignificant consideration – a banner or a fight song or even the goofy camaraderie of the locker room isn’t going to tip him over, either.

“I thought about the long run,” Hill said. “I think a lot of players, their families are hurting back home. Every time I go home and take a moment to myself and think where I could be and where we’re at now as a family. I try not to let that weigh too much, because if I did I probably wouldn’t be here today – I’d probably be heading out (to the NFL).

“But I put it in perspective. My future can be a lot brighter.”

And that’s a tune you can dance to.