It does matter

I’m sure that most of you have seen the beer commercial that has one guy bringing a beer to his buddy, and one for him. There is a football game that is shown on the TV. The beer tender asks his buddy, “Whose playing?” The buddy opens the beer and says, “Does it matter?” And the beer tender opens his beer and says, “Nope.”

We all can understand this completely during this time of C-19. Even I was looking forward to watching a football game — any game —as long as there was a football, football players, coaches and referees, it was going to be a great day. I even started to take a liking to a couple of teams, and then it hit me that I really didn’t care that much for how these games ended and I have always cared about that.

As time went on, other conferences started playing and I loved the fact that Indiana beat Penn State and Michigan. Notre Dame is playing in a conference for the first time ever, and last Saturday they upset Number-one ranked Clemson in a two-overtime affair. After the game was over, the fans that were allowed in stormed the field. I’m sure there will be a Covid-19 fine that will come down hard on the Fighting Irish. I hope they counter with, “It was just a peaceful protest against all things Tiger or orange!”

Getting back into watching football seriously started for me when the teams out west were able to play again. I know that BYU has already been playing for a couple of months now, scheduling teams from around the country that were also scrambling to play games. I’ve seen them play on a few occasions, and they are piling up points and playing great defense. We’ll see how things work out in the long run for the boys from Provo.

Last weekend was the start of the Pac 8 season. Make that Pac 12 with two games canceled because of C-19. Those games between Arizona-Utah and Washington-California will not be made up. So, they will be considered no contests.

At 9:00 am Saturday morning the Arizona State Sun Devils played the USC Trojans in front of no one in the LA Coliseum and it didn’t seem to matter as the two teams battled until the final gun went off, with USC making a miraculous comeback, winning 28-27. I watched a little less than half of this game because I had other things to do, but to me it finally seemed like football was back.

In the last few weeks I spent time channel surfing games, trying to get interested since my EWU Eagles won’t play until the spring. Finally on Saturday night I got the chance to watch WSU and Oregon State play. It was the only game on at that hour and it was a good one.

New Cougar Coach Nick Rolovich rolled out his Run and Shoot offense with freshman Jayden de Laura running the scheme, and backup running back Deon McIntosh providing huge rushing yards in a Pac 12 opener in Corvallis. The Cougs prevailed, holding off a late-charging Beaver squad 38-28.

For those Cougar fans who were assuming the Run and Shoot would be similar to the Leach era Air Raid offense, let’s just say someday it might. But on Saturday night the running back had two purposes: run the ball and pass block and McIntosh, filling in for an injured Max Borghi, was really good. Let’s just say that Borghi had to be jealous of the opportunities, 18 rushes for 147 yards, that McIntosh was afforded. One hundred forty-seven rushing yards were the most by any running back in the last 13 seasons in Cougarville.

Watching the youngster from Hawaii take the reins of the Cougar offense was impressive after the first couple of series. He was only sacked once, and scrambled 8 times for 43 yards and a touchdown. He threw 2 TD passes as well. One of the few times the kid made a mistake was when he threw into double coverage in the end zone, and his pass was picked off.

I’m sure a lot of people wondered why Coach Rolovich would start a freshman over a couple of guys that had been in the Cougar system for a couple of years. Well de Laura ran the same offense in high school, and he certainly seems to know how to make it go.

The defense played a really good game but they did tire out in the second half, which was expected since the Cougars left 32 players in Pullman for reasons unknown.

As football fans we should be grateful that the Pac 12 is back playing football again, because who we care to watch really does matter.