It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Part of the beauty of college football is that there is no force-fed parity like you get from the NFL. Sometimes you're up, and sometimes you're down.
In 2001, the Washington Huskies defeated the Drew Brees-led Purdue Boilermakers in the Rose Bowl and finished No. 3 in the country at season's end. On Saturday they'll be trying to break a streak of six straight 20-point losses. They'll be facing off against their in-state rival the Washington State Cougars. Washington State was in the Rose Bowl as recently as 2003 and beat Texas in the Holiday Bowl the following year. The Cougars will be looking for their second win of the year; unfortunately, the only other one came against the Portland State Vikings of the Football Championship Subdivision.
In Norman, Okla., a football game will be played that features two teams at the opposite sides of the college football pyramid. Texas Tech comes into the game as the No. 2 team in the nation and has two legitimate Heisman candidates in Graham Harrell and Michael Crabtree. The Oklahoma Sooners have a meager one loss themselves and will be coming into the game looking to defend their home field, where they have only one loss since 2001. You read that correctly, one home loss.
Viagra might as well jump on the opportunity to sponsor this year's annual Apple Cup, the name of the rivalry game between Washington and Washington State, because this game is sure to feature a great deal of offensive impotence. The Huskies rank 117th out of 119 schools in offensive yards per game at 263.5, yet the Cougars were able to do them one better, ranking 118th with 236.4 yards per game. The Cougars have already lost two quarterbacks to season-ending injuries and were forced to hold open tryouts to find another quarterback for their roster.
On the other side of the spectrum are the offenses of both the Oklahoma Sooners and the Texas Tech Red Raiders. Their match-up on Saturday will make a fast-forward version of the Apple Cup look like slow motion. Oklahoma touts the best offense in terms of points per game at 51.4, and its super-sophomore quarterback Sam Bradford has led the team to third in passing yards per game with 355.5. The Texas Tech Red Raiders are just a modest third in scoring offense, with just 47.9 points per game, but they do carry the banner for the nation's most traveled passing offense with 433.7 yards per game.
Tyrone Willingham came to the University of Washington from Notre Dame with hopes of turning around a once-proud program that had just endured a 1-10 season. However, he would end up taking a team that returned 19 starters to a 2-9 record. He is the only coach in Washington history to have three straight losing seasons and has long since clinched his fourth for this year. On Oct. 27, it was announced that Willingham would be fired at year's end after amounting just an 11-35 record and never finishing higher than ninth in the Pac-10 during his time in Seattle. Paul Wulff became the head coach for the Washington State Cougars at the beginning of the 2008 season after eight successful years at nearby Eastern Washington University. He was a former Cougar who reportedly once played the Apple Cup five days after having his appendix removed. This year's Apple Cup may actually end up being more painful than that procedure as he tries to will his team out of the basement of the Pac-10 in his first year on the job.
Mike Leach has always been a gifted offensive mind (the man was able to mold Tim Couch into a No. 1 overall draft pick) and spent time as an assistant coordinator under coach Bob Stoops of Oklahoma. Now at Texas Tech, he has led prolific offense after prolific offense as nearly every year features a different Red Raiders quarterback breaking a record. Kliff Kingsburry, B.J. Symons, and Cody Hodges are all record-holding Texas Tech quarterbacks, not a fledgling boy band as you may have guessed. Leach has no losing seasons at Texas Tech; he's had four seasons with at least nine wins and five bowl wins in eight appearances. Stoops has been a model for success in college football ever since he won the national championship in only his second season at Oklahoma. He has taken the Sooners to six BCS bowl games in his nine years and has a good chance of getting to another one this year. He has won five Big 12 championships and is looking for a win over Texas Tech this weekend to move toward his third straight.
It may amaze some that these two games will be played on the same day during the same time of the year, one game to decide arguably the best team in the country and the other to decide the most deficient program in the nation. Who knows, in five years, it could all have turned. Washington and Washington State could be BCS contenders, and Texas Tech and Oklahoma could have faded into anonymity. Washington defensive lineman Johnie Kirton may have said it best when he told the Seattle Post Intelligencer, "Growing up (in Mill Creek), it was either Washington State in a Rose Bowl or Washington in a Rose Bowl, so it's kind of embarrassing that both of us are doing so bad right now, but at the same time, there's always a hard time for a program, and there's always a way up, too." Keep your head up, Johnie, at least you're not paying to watch the game.
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