Jacob Thorpe: Soak up the Apple Cup win Cougars. This is the moment you needed, this is why you keep playing the game.
SEATTLE – Stop playing the Apple Cup? Are you nuts?
A foolish idea from last year has proved self-defeating. For if cooler heads had not prevailed and found a way to continue this tradition – albeit, a nontraditional “neutral-site” version at Seattle’s Lumen Field – then Cougars fans would have been deprived of the capstone to one of the greatest weeks Washington State athletics has had.
This is the week WSU punched back. Blow up the historic Pac-12, the “Conference of Champions”, for reasons that make sense only to people who care more about TV market shares than the games themselves? The Cougars will build a new conference. Dangle the Apple Cup rivalry like some charitable trinket, a courtesy game from a rival whose advantages grow each season? WSU snatched it away.
Big games like this keep a beleaguered community from becoming demoralized. Playing the Apple Cup gave the Cougars an opportunity to win it. Winning the Apple Cup puts the Cougars on a glide path to the kind of year that reminds fans why they become emotionally and monetarily invested in all this.
Win the Apple Cup. Win more games. Have a big season. Enter the rebuilt Pac-12 conference as one of the favorites.
“It’s such a critical time for Washington State football,” Cougars coach Jake Dickert said after the game. “And if you can’t get behind this team, in this moment, I just don’t know what more we can do. These guys stayed here for this. For this moment.”
There may not have been so many WSU fans in the building on Saturday to witness WSU’s 24-19 win, certainly not as many as fans who now wish they had been there. But there were more than expected, and they sure were loud. There were more than enough to storm the field.
Stop playing the Apple Cup? Depriving us all of the whiff of Minshew-mania emanating from star, yes star, WSU quarterback John Mateer? The sophomore from Bellingham is building a legacy, and he already has an Apple Cup win to his name.
A few quarterbacks out of Pullman have captivated fans recently. Besides Gardner Minshew, guys like Luke Falk, Anthony Gordon and Cam Ward were dazzling players who led the Cougars to wins, bowl games, Top 25 rankings. They all had some magic to them.
But all were knocked off by the Apple Cup, a previously cursed game at the end of otherwise happy seasons that punctured buoyant WSU fans such that they learned to dread the end of the season.
But Mateer’s season is just getting started and he has already slayed the dragon.
Maybe the reason UW has won nine of the past 10 matchups is simply because the Huskies had a lucky stretch of exceptionally talented, well-coached teams. Guys who wore purple jerseys in Apple Cups of the past decade are all over NFL rosters, former coach Chris Petersen is a hall of famer, and Kalen DeBoer was the pick to succeed Nick Saban at Alabama.
But this UW team? It has some talent, but the gap is significantly reduced. Head coach Jedd Fisch has coached some good teams and some bad ones. Not many UW fans will be satisfied with his performance Saturday.
UW will probably continue to have more highly regarded recruiting classes as it capitalizes on Big Ten membership. Still, why shouldn’t the Cougars be favored to start a winning streak in Pullman next season?
One suspects that now many of the Seattle-area WSU fans who missed Saturday’s win will make the longer, more expensive trip over the mountains for that game. After all, who would want to miss the Apple Cup?