Let's start off today with a nod to Grady and Nuss over at Coug Center. They run an excellent blog over there and have been good sports about the ribbing I have been giving them the past week.
I know posting a photo of a guy carrying a sheep isn't exactly a classy response to any subject but when I saw the picture I couldn't summon the proper restraint. One of our posters suggested that the stereotype may not be appreciated East of the mountains.
It of course brings to mind the UW fraternity that actually used a sheep in the not too distant past as part of their initiation proceedings. God only knows what exactly was going on there. It proves one thing...there are sheep on both sides of the mountains and UW may be getting more use out of theirs.
I guess the point I am trying to make it is all in fun but sometimes fun is defined in the eye of the beholder so if I ruffled some feathers please accept my apology.
One thing I want to stress is the quality that visitors who support other teams who visit our site bring to the overall discussion. "Johnny Cougar" is a great example of that kind of discourse. We always want to make sure that fans of other teams are welcome here because they bring a lot of good stuff to the table.
Michael Wines from the Oregon blog is a great example of guy from a hated rival that you just can't hate. He is one of the nicer guys in the blogosphere. I haven't mentioned Michael and his blog lately so a shout out is due especially in a year where the ducks finally won a Pac 10 basketball game.
Bob Condotta of the Seattle Times is a Coug. I never knew that until recently. Sedihawk who runs the excellent WSU blog refers to him as "Benedict Bob" since he covers the Huskies for a living. Unlike Jim Moore he has actually been able to rationalize selling out to put food on the family table. Husky fans are lucky for that too because he is the best football beat writer in the biz IMHO.
Jim Moore on the other hand has public ally stated that he would rather go homeless than support the Huskies in any manner. In fact he wrote a recent column questioning Jim Michalczik's loyalty when he accepted a job as offensive line coach at Washington. We all know how well that worked out.
Jim of course may be looking for a job in a couple of weeks if the PI closes down if expected. I think it would be funny if the only job offers he received were Husky related,
That being said I think we will all miss the PI writers if they are disbursed to the open market. A lot of great memories at that paper that stretch back over a century.
Arizona Series
When you get down to this part of the season every game seems to be the biggest one of the year and the Arizona State game on Thursday is no exception. If we get by on that one we will say the same thing about Arizona followed by WSU.
The saving grace on these three games is they are all at home and Washington has dominated at home this season only losing to California in triple overtime. I predict the Huskies finish out with three gutty wins.
Washington does have one last non conference game against a very scrappy Seattle U. team who beat Eastern Washington on the road last night in Cheney for their 10th consecutive win.
The Redhawks are playing their first season of quasi division one sports and they are currently ranked 144 in the Sagarins with that rating due to climb because of last nights win. To put that in perspective they are rated higher than 4-5 WCC schools in the Sagarins at this point. They are also the top independent in the country rating and win wise.
The Redhawks goal is to join the WCC which was reluctant to give them an immediate invitation because of potentially low RPI and the problem of having four more conference games if the conference was to expand.
Can the Redhawks beat the Huskies?
Absolutely not on paper but this one will be a lot closer than people think. SU is very scrappy and this is their bowl game so to speak. this should be an inter sting tune up for the Dawgs before the Pac 10 tournament starts.
Sports Bog Network and Yahoo Sports
Sports Blog Network and Yahoo Sports will be working together starting today with Yahoo sports providing links to all the SBN blogs. They are thinking it is going to bring in quite a few more readers.
It will be interesting to watch over the next couple of days to see how that progresses. If it does bring more readers in it means they will be readers from other schools.
One thing you may notice is if there is any type of profanity in a post I delete it even though it has been up to this point very innocent. The reason for that is simple and that is SBN doesn't want profanity of any type in the blog. That becomes more important now that they have started this relationship with Yahoo.
So when you mean WOW say WOW and not one of those seven other words that George Carlin was so fond of.
As many of you may be aware I also send some of these articles over to the Seattle Examiner each week. The timing of the release over there is different from here but it is basically the same content.
One time I wrote that Washington had nipped Stanford. Unknown to me is that nip or nipped was an unallowable word and I was censured by the computer for profanity.
I sent a note to my editor that I had no idea why nipped wasn't allowed and perhaps I should have used areola instead which got a good laugh. They had actually automatically formatted in a defense against the word because it may be offensive to people of Japanese ancestry.
It also shows how my mind was working because I had forgot the use of that word in that context. I can see how that could be offensive in the right context however it never crossed my mind since nipped in the bud is a favorite phrase of mine.
So anyway thanks to all the posters who come here and be ready for some new ones in the not too distant future. Keep in mind that most posters who support other schools bring some good stuff to the table.