John Blanchette: Cougs remain humble in breakout season

PULLMAN – For a team so thrilled to be winning – with a fan base that’s positively berserk about the idea – the Washington State Cougars certainly talk a lot about the dark days when they didn’t.

But maybe that’s understandable.

Because when they were losing, the Cougs talked constantly about not settling for that.

Now they’re refusing to settle for simply winning. The 75-47 beatdown they put on rival Washington on Saturday at Friel Court was the Huskies’ biggest humiliation in the 261 games of the series and yet another step toward a new order for the Cougars – who are doing their damnedest not to be as impressed with this as everyone else.

Good luck with that, fellas.

“The coaches have done a good job of keeping us humble, of understanding where we were just last year,” said forward Robbie Cowgill. “We’re still tight-roping that fine line between being successful or losing to anybody.

“Actually, it’s pretty easy to be humble when your last two seasons were like the ones we had.”

Besides, they got a little extra ammo Saturday. Not only had the Huskies lost five of their previous six games, but star center Spencer Hawes rolled his ankle coming down after a blocked shot in practice on Friday and didn’t play. If the experience doesn’t chase Hawes to the NBA next year, it’s hard to imagine what will. Surely he had to be sitting on the bench thinking to himself, “What the hell am I doing here?”

After all, he signed on with what was supposed to be the hottest hoops thing in the Northwest. Now that happens to be Wazzu, and on hand Saturday to help drive home the point was the largest Friel crowd – 11,618 – since the all-timer of 12,422 that watched the Cougs beat sixth-ranked UCLA back in 1983.

Hey, it’s a “most since” and “biggest since” and “first time since” kind of year.

The best compliment that can be paid to the patrons is that they didn’t storm the court, owing either to the understanding that there was no drama and that it was really no big deal.

The Huskies are in ninth place in the Pac-10, and look likely to stay there.

Hawes’ absence was one thing – even the Cougars’ Ivory Clark acknowledged “it would have been a lot different” had he played. But the fact is, the likes of proven talents Jon Brockman and Justin Dentmon looked pretty damned ordinary on Saturday, and that might be inflating it, and that’s not even getting into the three starters who didn’t score.

Then again, making teams look ordinary is what these Cougars do.

“They just compete,” said Brockman, “in every single part of the game.”

In the space of nine minutes in the first half, the Huskies endured 14 empty possessions and went from trailing by five points to down 20 – though for some reason, UW coach Lorenzo Romar didn’t feel the need to expend a timeout to stanch the gusher, a let’s-get-out-of-here-men white flag if ever there was one.

At halftime, the kids from the dojo came out to break boards and bricks and discovered that the Huskies hadn’t left any in one piece – shooting just 30.8 percent.

And after halftime, it got worse.

In their surge to this giddy overlook, the Cougars have managed to detour the usual emotional highs and lows that afflict any nouveau bully because the tone continues to be set by their defense – as it was even before they got good.

Cowgill joked to his teammates Saturday that he’d held the precocious Hawes “to zero tonight by myself – 16 under his average” – before noting that by always doubling the post, swarming and trapping, “We play big men with our whole team – and that helps us.

“It’s a defensive system,” he said. “To be honest, it’s effort-related. If your style is offensive oriented and your shots aren’t falling, you’re not playing well. With us, we always want to get back and set our defense and it’s something that shouldn’t be different in any game. There really shouldn’t be lapses in something that’s more mental and effort-related than physical.”

If this tends to undervalue both Wazzu’s imagination on offense and the skills of its players, well, that’s all right with coach Tony Bennett, too – although he did acknowledge, sort of, that the Cougs can be a tough scout.

“Any team that has some balance,” he said, “can be a challenge.”

These Cougars have that, certainly, but they have something almost as valuable: perspective, gained over the course of three difficult years when Bennett’s father, Dick, tried to lay a foundation on what had been Flubber. They catch themselves before they celebrate too much, noting – as Cowgill did – that “if we don’t play the right way, we can lose to anybody.”

Rarely has humility been such a powerful tool.

“One of the great things Dick Bennett did for this team when he was here was that he never let losing become OK,” Cowgill said. “We weren’t very good, but we never went into a game expecting to lose – and when we lost to a better team, that wasn’t OK with us or with him. We still had that expect-to-win mentality.”

And do they ever expect to now.