Coug casting call gives armchair quarterbacks a chance

PULLMAN – And the winner of The Great Scout Team Star Search is …

Well, we won’t know until 9 this morning.

This is a moment to hang on to at Washington State, unlike anything that’s happened so far this football season of despair, and you can hardly blame Paul Wulff for milking every bit of good feeling out of it.

Because it is good.

Yes, it is a little desperate. And a little comical – or at least it was to overhear one of the audition hopefuls talk up his credentials from high school, noting that he had been the “emergency quarterback my senior year.”

Hey, put that in the media guide.

But at Martin Field on Monday afternoon, 28 proud members of the WSU student body turned out for the chance to be practice fodder on soon-to-be-miserable fall afternoons. To quarterback the scout team offense, replicating plays as USC’s Mark Sanchez or Arizona’s Willie Tuitama and knowing he’s a pale imitation. To go to bed sore and wake up sorer. And to do it all for nothing more than a slap on the butt or a whack on the shoulder pads by way of thanks.

Sorry, ghouls. Cougar football isn’t dead yet.

Not if Wulff can sound the alarm for help and have more than two platoons come running – and jump through the paperwork hoops, to boot.

These guys’ color really is crimson.

“This is something we can do to help out the Cougars,” said Jon Koepfgen, one of the four survivors waiting to hear Wulff’s decision, “because they need some help right now.”

Well, that was the idea. But the response was something else.

“I thought we’d get four or five kids who might actually get all the paperwork in,” Wulff admitted. “Then I walk up to the field and see all these people – this is awesome that so many would want to come and help the team.

“There will probably be a few down at The Coug tonight that didn’t make it saying, ‘Yeah, I tried out for the football team.’ And that’s OK.”

If you don’t know the background, recall that Wazzu’s top two quarterbacks, Kevin Lopina and Gary Rogers, both suffered spinal/neck injuries in the Portland State game. Third-stringer Marshall Lobbestael is a freshman playing behind a patchwork line. To allow the other two freshmen behind him to properly prepare as backups, Wulff needed another body – or two – to run the scout team.

So the cattle call went out and the Cougs came – one-time quarterbacks from Elma and Rochester and Olympia. Reggie Orozco was an all-conference linebacker at Pasco, but he gave it a shot. Johnny Encinas, who actually succeeded Lobbestael as the quarterback at Oak Harbor, didn’t make the cut this time.

There was even a player Wulff recruited – eight years ago, as head coach at Eastern Washington.

Wydell Duncan was a defensive tackle then from St. John-Endicott. He broke an ankle that fall, then went on a two-year LDS mission and never returned to campus. Now 26, he’s married with two children and closing in on a history degree at WSU.

“Thanks, coach,” he told Wulff. “I have no eligibility left – I was just out here having fun.”

This wasn’t a goof, but fun was part of it.

“I wasn’t going to come out, but I knew I’d hate myself for a long time if I didn’t at least try,” said Jackson Brooks, a former backup at Columbia River in Vancouver. “My goal was not to embarrass myself.”

Nobody did. Sure, a couple couldn’t hit the net strung between the uprights from 40 yards out, but some of us recall Alex Brink coming up short of the end zone on a Hail Mary against USC a year ago from about the same distance.

“Some of them,” Wulff laughed, “looked like me throwing the football. But a few had obviously played some quarterback.”

Including the final four. Koepfgen played at Palo Alto High School across the street from Stanford, though he looks different these days – he grew six inches and added 50 pounds after his senior season. Cameron Gredler was a year behind Cougars receiver Brandon Gibson at Rogers High School in Puyallup. Mark Gray – just 5-foot-9 but a bigger talent – took Issaquah to the State 3A semifinals in 2003. And Peter Roberts started for two years at Woodinville and had considered walking on earlier but was dissuaded by the academic demands of his architecture major.

“I like to see the coaches turn to the student body for help,” Gredler said. “It’s kind of crazy – but it’s kind of cool.”

So is this:

“These guys are fans like anybody else,” Wulff said. “And I can see the guy we pick getting the biggest ovation of anyone coming through the tunnel against USC – and I think that would be great. I’d have no problem with that. This team needs something like that right now.”

And the winner? He needs to show up at the football office this morning to find out.

“I’ll have to get one of my (Sig Ep) brothers to do it,” Koepfgen said. “I’m in a lab at 9.”

“Academics first,” chimed in one of those brothers.

Hey, that’s cool, too.