Let's start with the big picture shall we? Approximately 14 billion years ago — give or take a few million years — the known universe began and there were no college athletics conferences. For that matter, there were no colleges nor humans to attend them or compete in sporting events to eventually be manipulated by other humans. It was a simple time, with a significant lack of humans available to create unnecessary stress.
A mere 10 billion or so years later, the solar system formed around the centerpiece known as the sun (a giant mass of incandescent gas... if you know your They Might Be Giants songbook). Fast forward to whenever those troublemaking humans showed up on one of the planets they arrogantly called Earth and which some of them still maintain is flat instead of spherical. About 5 billion years from now, the sun will begin its inevitable expansion and engulf and destroy the Earth. At that time, any remaining humans will care even less than ESPN does now about the sacred traditions of West Coast-based conference affiliations. In that big picture, none of this matters, nor will it ever matter.
But for the time being, it does matter to some humans and, as we have discovered, some of those humans are decidedly greedier than others and in a position to exercise that greed. These humans go by several monikers: media executives, school presidents, athletic directors, rancid polecats. No matter the moniker or its accuracy, they are essentially after one thing: to create something that financially benefits them. If an existing condition — let's say, a conference created by schools a long time ago to compete against each other in athletics — does not suitably make them more wealthy than they already are, then... begone with that conference! (That line reads best in a proper English accent.)
And so it shall be that this year's various versions of the Apple Cup — football, basketball, soccer, volleyball, baseball, etc. — will all be the last of their Pac-12 kind due to the departure in pursuit of greener pastures of a school allegedly called the University of Washington, along with nine other Benedict Arnold schools of highly dubious or outright ill repute. It sounds like there will be a football Apple Cup for the next five seasons, which is better than no Apple Cup for sure. But the teams will not be conference rivals in the same way as now, when the stakes can be high as they are this year with a Cougar bowl game on the line and the Huskies perfect season hanging in the balance.
Still, games are not all about winning. They're about competition and emotion, in some cases entirely capable of pulling you, kicking and screaming, between extraordinary plays, efforts, or conversely, inexplicable errors.
Competition + emotion = Apple Cup.
If you are fortunate enough to be a Coug, for the football version of the Apple Cup, who can forget the unadulterated joy those fateful days in 1982, when the Cougs played in Pullman for the first time in 28 years and knocked the overconfident 5th-ranked Huskies out of an expected Rose Bowl berth? How about 1988, when snow arrived at a timely moment and Shawn Landrum famously blocked a punt to help get the 32-31 victory in Pullman? In 1992, a real dump of snow arrived; Drew Bledsoe, CJ Davis and others took full advantage of a discombobulated Husky team for a 42-23 win in Pullman. Then there was 1997, when Ryan Leaf led the Cougs to their Rose Bowl-clinching 41-35 victory in Seattle — their first trip to the Rose Bowl in 67 years.
So, yes, we all recall the plays, the scores from whatever year has affected us most — maybe quicker than the names of our children — because Competition + Emotion = Apple Cup.
So you see, in the big picture nothing really matters. But despite the efforts of meddling humans, the Apple Cup will always matter. ♦
WSU alum Tony C. Duarte has covered the Cougs for decades as a former Inlander staff writer and for the late, great fan site CougZone.
