UW: The Nadir

I was snookered. Consider it the last time I overestimate an 0-10 team. After the Huskies stole defeat from the jaws of victory in a 16-13 double-overtime Crapple Cup loss to the Cougars, it can't get any worse for UW -- except that it can. The Huskies will be heavy underdogs against Cal Saturday in a quest to go 0-12. Wow. The only winless team in major-college football is also one that made a Rose Bowl this decade and won a national championship during the last one, all the while a Top-20 program. The fall from grace is complete. So how did Tyrone Willingham drive this train so far off the rails? It's instructive to look at Willingham's past to see how his present is so bad.

It's hard to remember that four years ago Willingham was a hot coaching prospect. He had success and moral outrage on his side after getting canned by Notre Dame. His ouster after a three-year record of 21-16 caused consternation among some Irish faithful who felt the school debased itself in the name of winning at any cost. Prior to that, Willingham was successful in Palo Alto, where he brought Stanford -- Stanford! -- to a Rose Bowl. (It's also hard to remember a time when USC didn't have a stranglehold on the Pac-10). But what those schools have in common are high academic standards. Willingham was a success working under those circumstances, but apparently doesn't have what it takes to operate outside them.

I imagine Willingham in living rooms coming across as a military recruiter, exuding confidence and integrity, while appealing as much to parents as he does to the athlete. When you're recruiting people considering Stanford or Notre Dame, you're dealing with kids who are real student-athletes, insofar as they exist in major-college football. Presumably they're successful at juggling the rigors of football with long hours of classwork. By and large, they're self-motivated. But at a place like UW -- or most schools, for that matter -- where more external motivation is needed, Coach Ty fell flat.

Willingham clearly failed as a motivator. He has the charisma of dry toast, and his press conferences and interviews are notoriously bland, even by the diluted standards of coachspeak. You don't have to be a quote machine to be successful, but it helps to change your expression once in a while. Pete Carroll, Nick Saban and Mike Leach are different in that they're affable, slick and quirky, respectively, but they all have personality. In addition to being good recruiters, they seem to get through to their players most of the time. But Willingham never got through to his UW teams. (Also, Willingham didn't recruit well early on, but his recent classes have been better. I bet a better motivator has more success with Ty's players next year.) His stoic demeanor looked more distant and icy as the losses mounted. At schools like Stanford and Notre Dame, Willingham could get away with the edict-from-on-high thing, but that didn't cut it at UW. Willingham didn't motivate his players, and if you're not a motivator, you're not really a coach.

Despite all this, I still think Willingham can be successful elsewhere. UW fans probably don't care where Willingham goes, just that he is going. But install Ty at a service academy or a brainy school and he can win again, and some schools fitting this description might soon have openings. It's not hard to picture Willingham at Vanderbilt, where Bobby Johnson has the Commodores poised to go to a bowl for the first time since 1982. Certainly bigger programs will come calling, and Johnson's name has been linked to the Clemson vacancy. Northwestern has won 9 games under hot young coach Pat Fitzgerald, but it's not clear if he wants to leave Evanston; Fitzgerald was a linebacker on the Wildcats team that made the 1996 Rose Bowl. Rice is also uncharacteristically bowl-eligible, and the Owls' fan base might approve of an established name like Willingham if that job were to open up. (Lt. Daniels could weigh in on this). But it's also quite possible that Willingham's reputation is so bruised by his UW failure that he has to take an assistant job somewhere.

Fans might disagree, but I think the UW program is in better shape than when Willingham came on four years ago. That's not saying much because he took over a house in shambles, following a 1-10 season in 2004. The team had little talent and was still dealing with the aftermath of Rick Neuheisel's malfeasance. These days, the program is cleaner, and if you surround Jake Locker with a modicum of talent next year, UW will win at least a few games. Nonetheless, much of UW's failure clearly lies at the feet of its coach. He didn't recruit well enough early on, and his style was a bad fit at a place like Washington. It's almost too bad because it confirms the old adage: nice guys finish last.

UW head coach rumor mill

The news came out yesterday that the University of Washington interviewed Notre Dame offensive coordinator Michael Haywood to replace Ty Willingham. I can't imagine that Haywood is a serious candidate, because 1) Notre Dame's offense stinks and 2) he is not even calling the plays for the shitty Notre Dame offense.

More significantly, I think he's not a big enough name that will appease the fans. The school wants someone who creates buzz and I just don't think the mastermind of the shitty Notre Dame offense is that guy.

The Dice Game and Lady Dice were at dinner with some friends talking about this news when Dice Friend, an individual who happens to be in the know about these things, shocked us. I asked, "Dice Friend, who do you think is going to be the next UW coach?"

"Jim Mora, Jr."

Isn't this the same individual who is under contract to coach the Seahawks next year? The chosen one? Dice Friend said it doesn't matter and that the Seahawks will not hold him to the contract because of the PR disaster it would cause locally if the team prevented him from taking the UW job. Even more surprising was the next name thrown out by Dice Friend.

"Mark Richt."

The Georgia coach? Why would he leave a top flight SEC school with fertile recruiting to come coach at UW? Dice Friend says money. Georgia is apparently not compensating Richt that well and UW is willing to pay to make a big splash. Richt can recruit, but can he coach? Is there a more disappointing team this season in college football than the Georgia Bulldogs? That whole idea seems crazy to me.

One coach that had been mentioned -- Gary Pinkel from Missouri -- seems like he's now off the market for the UW job.

I just share the knowledge. Y'all can discuss.

Waka Waka Waka

Don Wakamatsu. We don’t know anything about him. The one thing I get from reading the papers is that he’s detail oriented, which I guess puts him more on the roto-geek side of things than the gut feeling side. But that doesn’t tell us whether he’ll be any good; you can be a good roto-geek manager or a bad one, and you can be a good gut feeling manager or a bad one.

He’s worked for every single team in the American League West. He says he thinks it helped him get the job, but I don’t understand how being the bench coach in Texas a while ago helps you beat Texas now.

As a minor league manager, he compiled a losing record. That goes against Jack the GM’s claim that a history of winning would be a primary consideration, but minor league managers’ records don’t mean anything. Your personnel is moving around all the time, and the emphasis is on developing players, not winning. So let’s give him a pass on that for now.

In short, I see every reason to be optimistic. So far, it looks like the Mariners did right by hiring Jack the GM. And it looks like the organization is committed to building a long-term winner instead of a short-term loser. So that’s be a nice change.

I do have one concern. Well, concern is too strong, but it might be something to watch. Everybody has heard the rumors that Ichiro gets special treatment, and that that’s the main reason the players were having fist fights in the clubhouse last year. The next step in that speculation is that there are larger issues between the Latin players and the Japanese players. Wakamatsu is Japanese, and it makes you wonder how the Latin players—Felix, Yuni, Beltre, Jose Lopez—will react. Or how Ichiro and Johjima will react.

On the other hand, Wakamatsu is a relatively young guy who grew up in Oakland. Somehow, it seems like he has a better chance to deal with any cultural complexities that might arise than the old white dudes from bumblefuck who we’ve been hiring to do the managing.

Sour Apples

On November 23, 2001, college football fans from Piscataway, NJ to Berkeley, CA -- and nowhere in between -- eagerly awaited the kickoff of the Cal-Rutgers game. Each team hoped the other would cure what ailed them. And that season, there were nothing but ailments for both clubs. Rutgers entered the game 2-8, while Cal sported an 0-10 record, in a contest that featured future NFL underachievers Kyle Boller and L.J. Smith. AND, the hype had been building all season. The game was pushed back to November from mid-September because of the 9/11 attacks. So as fall eased toward winter along the banks of the Raritan, the excuses were over. The Battle of the Beatens was on!

That tilt is the closest I can come to approximating Saturday's Apple Cup. Like Cal, UW comes in 0-10 (I'll get to some more exciting parallels later), while Wazzu is 1-10. While we've documented the Huskies' putrefaction in this space all year, the Cougars might be worse. Aside from beating Jerry Glanville's hapless Portland State squad, WSU hasn't been competitive in a single game. They've given up at least 58 points six times and injuries forced them to hold an open-campus casting call for a quarterback. Consider that Saturday's loss to Arizona State represented the smallest margin of loss since October 4th. Consider that WSU lost 31-0. Since UW "only" bowed to ASU 39-19 last week, give the Huskies the edge. Meanwhile, Dennis Erickson is petitioning the NCAA to let the Sun Devils play WSU seven times next year, and UW the other five.

But unlike that pillow fight seven years ago, this Sour Apple Cup is a rivalry game. You know, you can throw out the records for this brawl. If only we could. Both sides always say that beating the other validates their season. For this year's winner, it'll be like a cherry on top of a triple turd sundae. 

Rivalry or not, is this not the worst game between two BCS schools since Cal-Rutgers? Let's open up the phone lines. Hello? Hello? Um, is this thing on? With a nod to Stanklin, cue the tumbleweeds. When you consider that UW and WSU have both played in Rose Bowls this decade, Saturday's game is even more shocking in its awfulness. 

But a history lesson from The Battle of the Beatens could offer solace to both UW and WSU. Late in 2001, Cal's head coach Tom Holmoe resigned as the season circled the drain, while UW's Tyrone Willingham is also "stepping down" at the end of the season. Cal brought in Jeff Tedford, who has turned the Golden Bears into a winning program, while now being mentioned as an outside candidate for the Husky job. Meanwhile, 2001 was current Rutgers head coach Greg Schiano's first year. Since then, he's brought the Scarlet Knights to unprecedented heights and rebuffed offers from bigger programs. WSU is also led by a first-year coach and former WSU football player Paul Wulff. Coincidence? Of course not. 

On November 23, 2001 in front of 18,111 fans, Cal beat Rutgers 20-10, sending coach Holmoe out a winner and euthanizing a season for two piss-poor teams. Ergo, my Sour Apple Cup prediction: UW 20, WSU 10, with Tyrone Willingham getting a turd sundae shower in place of Gatorade. 

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's to blame for it all?

In honor of Rick Neuheisel's return to Husky Stadium on Saturday, we thought we would serenade him with the lyrics of the hip-hop icon whose nickname he has been bestowed.

Best believe monas a virgin
A virgin? ! honey needed a slap
She tried to tell me shes a virgin -- with her yea wide gap
I said, it dont matter, see, Im not picky (word)
Let me spell my name out for you, its ricky:
R -- ravishing
I -- impress
C -- courageous; so careless
K -- for the kangols which Ive got
That I wear everyday and
Y -- why not?

Good lord, pay your respects to Rick the Ruler!

The liberal Seattle elite media has filled its pages this week with stories about how Slick Rick is to blame for the state of UW's football team. While I have no love for Slick Rick and hope to see him fail miserably at UCLA, he's not to blame.

Let's think about this. After Slick Rick left Colorado, the program lost five scholarships for one year, and was put on two years' probation for 51 rules violations while he was the coach. It's impossible to commit that many violations in a four-year period of time without leaving fingerprints. Did someone at UW perform some due diligence on this guy? How hard would it have been to go over to Colorado and see if the players go to classes? Are the players completely out of control?

Either UW knew what it was getting in Slick Rick and looked the other way or it didn't know because it didn't check thoroughly into his background. Either way the blame rests with the people who hired him. Slick Rick only did what comes natural to him. The scorpion and the frog. As Too Short once asked, "why you tryin' to turn a ho into a house wife?"

The Final Seven

SGB hates to say I told you so, but I told you so. I won’t be eating any pizzones, because, as I predicted, the Fab Five of Lloyd McClendon, Bobby Valentine, Art Howe, Willie Randolph, and Ned Yost aren’t on the Mariners’ managerial short list. In fact, it looks like they weren’t even on the long list.

I was thoroughly wrong about which Red Sox coaches would get the call—I thought it would be John Farrell and not DeMarlo Hale and Brad Mills, but it is in fact DeMarlo Hale and Brad Mills and not John Farrell—but I will make you another wager. If Hale (DeMarlo, not Chip, another candidate) or Mills gets the job, I’ll buy a round of pizzones for the entire SGB staff.

So here is the list: DeMarlo Hale (Red Sox third base coach), Brad Mills (Red Sox bench coach), Chip Hale (Diamondbacks third base coach), Joey Cora (White Sox bench coach), Jose Oquendo (Cardinals third base coach), Don Wakamatsu (Athletics bench coach), and Randy Ready (Portland Beavers manager).

There are four noteworthy things about these candidates: They’re young, they don’t have any major league managerial experience, the majority of them aren’t white (in Barack Obama's post-racial America, there is hope that these guys aren't affirmative action interviews and are instead on the list because Jack the GM wants them on the list), and they’re affiliated with well-run organizations. According to Jack the GM, it was this final characteristic—their history of winning—that put them on the list, and it will be leadership ability (whatever that means) that puts one of them on top.

As I said last week, I like Joey Cora. He’s young, he’s Latino, and he’s a fan favorite from his playing days in Seattle. Jose Oquendo doesn’t have the Mariners pedigree, but like Cora he’s a young Latino coach who used to be a decent middle infielder. Randy Ready has the best name in the group, but some SGB staffers watched the Portland-Tacoma tilt this summer, and frankly, Ready’s Beavers didn’t look very tight. I can’t say that I know enough about Chip Hale or Wakamatsu to make a judgment, but the larger point is this: This list gives me even more hope that Jack the GM is going to straighten the M’s out. Nobody knows enough about what goes on during the interview process to determine if, say, Chip Hale can manage personalities better than DeMarlo Hale, but we do know enough to say that Jack the GM is throwing conventional wisdom out the window.

And this team has run on conventional wisdom for the last decade. See this post for my overly long explanation of the “good baseball man” mentality that keeps the Mariners from being a “good baseball team.” By next week, we’ll know which of these seven guys is at the helm, and then the real work begins: Jack the GM will put together the team for the manager to manage. Right now, I trust that he knows what he’s doing. It’s a refreshing change to get the sense that the Mariners GM might be better at his job than I would be at his job.

Be My Valentine?

Jack the GM is about ready to start interviewing managerial candidates. So far, he's not tipping his pitches. "I do think what we're looking for is the best possible person," he said. Got that?

In the absence of any hints from Jack the GM, reporters put together a list of candidates by asking him, "What about person X?" He says, "Maybe so," and then wham! Person X is on the short list.

So we're hearing a bunch of names that sounds like the list of candidates for worst manager of the year, circa 2002. Lloyd McClendon? Seriously?

Then there's the Mets trinity of failure: Bobby Valentine, Art Howe, and Willie Randolph. (Is Dallas Green still alive?) Everybody's talking up Ned Yost, because he has a relationship with Jack the GM from their Brewers days. But the Brewers shitcanned Ned Yost right before their pennant run, so I'm not buying that.

The only reason we're talking about these also-rans as candidates is that we have to talk about somebody and they're the names we know. If it's any one of the five people mentioned above, I'll eat two Pizza Hut Pizzones in one sitting for free.

There was some buzz in the Times this morning about a few members of the Red Sox staff (John Farrell, DeMarlo Hale, and Brad Mills), but that's probably because somebody got interviews with Theo Epstein and Terry Francona. Of the three, Farrell's the most likely possibility. DeMarlo Hale is too intense, and intense is out since Joe Madden the baseball Buddhist meditated his way to the World Series. Brad Mills is just Francona's buddy from college.

Right now, the name I've heard that makes the most sense is Joey Cora. He's a legend in Seattle, and that helps when the Mariners brand is taking a beating. He's young, and that helps when the Mariners are rebuilding with young guys. (Bobby Valentine may be famous, but I don't see Yuniesky buying into his antics.) He's Latino, and that helps when many of the Mariners young guys are Latino, too.

In the end, whomever they pick, what matters is not who it is but what it says about the way Jack the GM wants to run the team. The manager will be like Palin in that way. She was an awful pick, which was bad in its own right, but even worse because it showed that McCain wasn't serious about governing.

Here's hoping that Jack the GM names a manager who shows he's serious about rebuilding smart.

Beavers in 2012

This isn't really Seattle-related, but it'll be interesting to see how the President-elect's brother-in-law does at the Pac-10's basketball doormat.

Ease our pain

SGB, along with the rest of the country, is still in awe of what happened last night with the election of Barack Obama. The problems of Seattle sports fans seem insignificant by comparison. That said, we still have to feed the beast so I will pass along this link.

Chris Ballard from Sports Illustrated synthesized what we have been saying for months. It's a bad time to be a Seattle sports fan or as Ballard puts it, "once-in-a-lifetime badness."

Enjoy

Nothing to do with Seattle, but this is too good to pass up.

A Winning UW Team?!

We know the Sonics are gone and the Seahawks and Huskies are awful. What we could find out, however, is that a UW team might be good this season. The Huskies basketball team has some arrows in its quiver and should finish in the top half of the Pac-10.

UW looks to rebound from last year's losing record because head coach Lorenzo Romar is much better than football coach Ty Willingham in one key area: recruiting. As Stanklin recently noted, Lute Olson's retirement allowed UW to persuade Abdul Gaddy to stay home. That's luck more than anything else. But Romar has convinced more local talent to come to UW than his predecessors. And he's done it at a place that's historically a football school.

New to the team this year is Isaiah Thomas (not the suicide-attempting one, although the younger version got his name because his dad lost a bet during 1989 NBA Finals between the Pistons and Lakers). The 5'8" Tacoma product is a guard in the Nate Robinson mold: he averaged 31 points his junior year, before spending two years at a prep school in Connecticut. He's ranked as the #23 shooting guard by Scout.com, although he'll probably play the point at UW. Either way, he should be able to contribute immediately.

The big gun returning is All-America candidate Jon Brockman. The senior from Snohomish averaged nearly 18 points and 12 rebounds last year and, as they say, leaves it all on the floor. And according to his bio, Jay Bilas considers him the best rebounder in the nation. That should count for something, no?

Junior guard Quincy Pondexter should also be a solid contributor, as he moves back into the starting lineup after coming off the bench most of last year. He is the last vestige of UW's version of a Fab Five recruiting class. Led by Seattle product Spencer Hawes, that group was expected to anchor the team for years. But Hawes inadvisedly jumped to the NBA after one year (he would be a junior this year if he'd stayed), and others transferred, but that's hardly Romar's fault. Such is life in college basketball these days.

The Huskies have reached unprecedented heights under Romar. They were a #1 seed in the '05 NCAA Tournament, and that was the first of two straight trips to the Sweet 16. Those squads were led by Nate Robinson and then Brandon Roy, two Seattle studs who chose to stay home. Romar could easily have jumped to a higher-profile program after that, but the UW alum also chose to stay home. If Hawes had wisely chosen to hone his game here rather than languish on the end of the Sacramento Kings' bench, we might be talking about a top-15 team.

As it is, the Huskies are being picked to finish fifth in the Pac-10, but that was before Olson bolted from Arizona. UW has gotten some Top-25 votes, and they could make some hay in conference. UCLA is still stout, even after losing Russell Westbrook and Kevin Love, and Arizona State and USC are also expected to be strong. But Washington State should be down after losing most of last year's starting lineup and there's flux elswhere: four Pac-10 schools have new coaches.

UW's out-of-conference schedule ranges from brutal (Kansas) to cupcake-esque (Portland and Portland State, Cleveland State and Lehigh among others). But it definitely tends more toward more tomato cans than bullies.

Continuity at the coaching position and solid recruiting give UW basketball fans hope for the future. But the present doesn't look so bad either. 20 wins and a run at an NCAA berth are realistic goals for this year's team. And at least we know this basketball team isn't leaving town.