Are you ready for some (crappy) football!?!

Every year when the beginning of September rolls around, I get very excited. The summer is just about over with, and football season is starting up. I love football. I always wish that I would have played when I was in school. If only they didn’t make kids give up the last 3 weeks of summer vacation, I would have been there.

With three teams on three different levels that I like to root for, there is usually a good chance that one of the three teams will have a good year, and I can enjoy watching them play. Sometimes if I am lucky maybe two of the teams will be good. But after a year like this, I would be happy if one of my teams would just finish the season with a .500 record. Although at this point, there is only one team that can pull that off, and from what I listened to on the radio yesterday, their chances of a non-losing season are not very good.

I will start with the lowest level of play, and work my way up. With that being said, the first team that I root for are from the high school that I went to here in Kennewick, the Kennewick High Lions.

I didn’t know what to expect from this years’ Kennewick football team. Last year they went 9-3, losing to the eventual state champions in the quarterfinals of the state football playoffs. It was the first time since 1993 that they had posted a record that good. And they lost a lot of talent to graduation. But after watching some of the underclassmen play last year, I thought that maybe it wouldn’t be too bad this year. I was hoping for maybe a 6-4 record. Heck, even a 5-5 record wouldn’t be too bad after what they had done the year before. I guess that was just wishful thinking on my part.

Long story short, they finished the season 2-8. And due to scheduling conflicts, I was only able to make it to 3 games this year, which were all losses. But I do have hope for next year for the mighty Lions. They have a lot of talent that is coming back, and they should be good.

The next team I cheer for is in the college ranks. But through the first 10 games of the season, I think they should have penciled Kennewick into their schedule so they could have a chance at winning another game. The team I am talking about is the Washington State Cougars.

Now everyone knows that WSU has never been a football powerhouse. They have had some fine seasons, but have only strung together winning seasons a few times in their long football history. Mix in the fact that not many blue chip football players want to move to a small town in the middle of crop circles and cow pies, and you can understand why. But this year is one of the worst I have ever seen.

There are many factors that contribute to the crappy football that is played out on their field. I do not have the space to list them all, so here are a few highlights.

~Bill Doba. Mr. Doba was the coach of WSU from 2003-2007. He had to take over when Mike Price was hired away by Alabama. Of course everyone knows that ol’ Mikey then blew that job by taking an interest in partying (and taking back to the hotel) with strippers.

Mr. Doba was not a good recruiter. I am not saying that he didn’t sign some talented recruits. But when a kid has more arrest warrants than touchdowns in his H.S. or Jr. College career, he usually isn’t a safe bet. But that didn’t stop Doba from rolling the dice. Too bad for the program, they came up craps. Over and over again.

~Since the new coach, Paul Wulf, who was hired late in the offseason was busy cleaning up the junk that Doba had left behind, he didn’t have enough time to recruit. When you don’t have enough time to recruit, you end with guys who should be coming off the bench in a flag football game instead of starting at a D-1 school.

~Injuries. Not that they would be a BCS quality program this year, but when you lose 3 QB’s to injuries, with one of them being a career injury setback to a kid who waited at the school 4 years to start, it can’t be a good thing. Mix in players being sent to prison or kicked off the team, and it makes for a very thin roster.
So far the Cougs have racked up a 1-9 record. And with 2 more league games to go, they have already given up more points (502, while only scoring 139 themselves.) than any Pac-10 program ever has. In fact, the big story on cougzone.com was about how they “erupted” for 28 points against Arizona on Saturday. Sounds good until you read further down the story that they also gave up 59 points in the same game. But hey, considering the last 3 games before that they lost 0-58 against Stanford, 0-69 against USC, and 13-66 to Oregon St., scoring 28 points in a single contest is a big deal.

I would have never thought that I would be looking forward to the WSU basketball season. And one bright spot, the Washington Huskies haven’t even won a game yet this year. I do take some comfort in that, and with any luck, they will keep it up.

OK, after profiling two of my football teams, the combined record of both of them comes out to 3-17. I wish that my favorite pro team could help that record out a little, but the sickness of sucking at football seems to have spread all across Washington State this year. That’s right folks; my favorite NFL team is the Seattle Seahawks.

Unlike the Lions and the Cougars, who are also flailing this year, the Seahawks don’t have the excuses that the other two teams have. Sure at the beginning of the year they had all of their receivers go down with injuries, and now Matt Hasselbeck is out with an injury, but the main difference here is that they are a professional team. They get paid to play this game.
Up to this point it has been an ugly season. They sit at 2-7 right now, with no bright spots in the schedule. Well, they do get to play the St. Louis Rams again, but other than that I don’t know of a game where they will be favored to win.

The Hawks can’t seem to do the following things: (get ready for a long list)
~Tackle
~Catch
~Throw
~Run
~Score

Now for those of you not familiar with the game of football, if you are not able to do those things at least partially well, the chances of you winning games on a consistent basis is slim to none. Take for example the game that they lost to the Dolphins this past Sunday. They had dropped passes in the end zone. They couldn’t tackle. And when you drop passes in the end zone, you CAN’T SCORE!!! If this is the way the Seahawks thought that their coach would want to go out, they have been listening to Obama supporters for too long.

So as you can see, it has not been the football season that I envisioned back when the days were still long and warm. My 3 teams are a combined 5-24. I can only hope that next year things will get better. But until then, I will continue watching the Seahawks get shot out of the sky, and hope that the Cougars will at least beat the Huskies in the Apple Cup. Because like I said, one thing that would salvage this year would be if the Huskies complete the perfect defeated season.