Huskies bail on the Zags, and Husky fans
Jun
25
It shouldn’t be so much to ask: Couldn’t somebody in charge in college athletics act like the enterprise hasn’t completely lost its mind?
We’re about to have athletes get on planes and travel 2,500 miles to decide who’s better in soccer and volleyball. We’re paying some jocks a couple of million dollars – for a few, that might be on the low side – to throw hitch passes and run the pick-and-roll. Some administrators are hell-bent to screw up the best thing about the NCAA, the men’s basketball tournament, because of course, more teams that go 8-10 in their conference will make it really good.
A sanity break from all this apparently won’t be found in the Washington athletic department, which has decided the collegiate sports world in these parts will be better if its men’s basketball team doesn’t play Gonzaga.
The Zags and Huskies had arranged a four-year home-and-home deal starting with the 2022-23 season. At the halfway point, Washington has invoked a clause in that contract that stipulates the deal can be voided in the event of a coaching change.
Washington finally cashed out Mike Hopkins after last season and beckoned Danny Sprinkle of Utah State. And with that, it has the standing to opt out of the last two years of the deal, and will, a move reported late last week by CBS Sports.
Nobody at Washington has said anything publicly by way of explanation. I’m told reliably that the Huskies initiated the opt-out. Gonzaga may have shrugged, figuring, not without reason, that if Washington’s NET ranking is 76 or worse next season, that’s merely a Quad 3 victory for the Zags.
Certainly, the new league will be demanding for Washington, requiring 20 Big Ten games and an inherently rigorous travel schedule.
But the irony is prodigious: To ease the rigors of traveling cross-country to play Penn State and Rutgers, the Huskies are lopping a national powerhouse across the state that requires a half-hour plane ride.
Make it make sense.
The Big Ten hasn’t yet announced its schedule for 2024-25, only each team’s opponents. Playing 20 last season, most conference teams had two league games the first week of December.
That leaves two-thirds of November and the rest of December to squeeze in non-league opponents. True, it can happen that one party is shy of obvious open dates, and I don’t know the specifics of Washington’s schedule. But it seems safe to assume that the Huskies concluded they have enough on their plate without taking on a team getting mention as a possible national titlist.
In any case, know this: If both sides want a game to happen, they can make it happen.
A commenter on the story in the Seattle Times, my old paper, pretty much nailed it: “Teams all over the country fight tooth and nail to get games like this on their schedule. New guy walks into the UW hoops program and says, ‘Nah, not interested.’ “
I’ll never understand the inclination to soft-pedal a non-league schedule in the name of getting victories. In almost all cases, the intrepid will get more points in analytics – and certainly in the court of public opinion – with even a competitive loss than they will a victory over a tomato can merely showing up for a payday.
Moreover, for all the challenges posed by the Big Ten, it isn’t as though Washington enters as a lost child in the wilderness, thanks to the transfer portal. Incoming is Great Osobor, the Mountain West player of the year last season at Utah State. It’s a team that should be at least competitive.
This has long since ceased to be a question of which program needs the other. If there’s any element of that, it’s the Huskies who need the Zags, who can schedule just about anybody in the country. Next season, Gonzaga plays Kentucky at Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, two-time defending champ Connecticut at Madison Square Garden, UCLA and San Diego State.
I can’t forget a conversation I had several weeks ago with a well-connected, old-line Husky. I asked him what sort of vibe he was getting from his friends about his school’s move to the Big Ten.
“Everybody hates it,” he said, stopping after three words.
Think he’d rather play at Minnesota, or see his team play Gonzaga?
The fans, as usual, take it on the shorts. It isn’t enough that West Coast teams have set up shop in the Eastern and Central time zones. It isn’t enough that their athletic departments cry poor and squeeze boosters for more cash to support NIL deals. Give us more, just keep giving us more.
I'm guessing the Huskies figure their fan base might be more inclined to accept the move since the first game of the final two years of the deal was to have been in Spokane. And assuredly, Washington will replace that date with a "buy" game at Edmundson Pavilion. (FYI, the home schedule of Sprinkle’s Utah State outfit last season consisted of Southern Utah, Cal-Irvine, San Diego and East Tennessee State. And Northwest Nazarene.)
So this becomes the latest chapter in a mostly lamentable saga of Washington dealings with its upstart neighbor in Spokane.
They played annually from the late ‘90s on, until, early in the 2000s, there was a celebrated rift caused by UW assistant Cameron Dollar’s NCAA-improper contact with Clarkston big man Josh Heytvelt. That, and what UW coach Lorenzo Romar considered negative recruiting by Gonzaga coach Mark Few and his staff, prompted the Huskies to call a halt to the series after the 2006-07 season.
Then came a misbegotten effort by the UW in 2009 to shame the Zags into a corner, when the Huskies proposed a three-year schedule of games at KeyArena, which would have had them playing four miles from their campus to Gonzaga’s 285-mile trip. Gonzaga turned that down like a fake Rolex and the ploy backfired, as Washington was widely scorned in the media for the charade.
Few and Romar came to a détente of sorts eventually, and the two sides agreed to terms again for the 2016-17 season. Then Hopkins took over at Washington. Few liked him – who didn’t like Hopkins (and playing his teams)? – and there was a full-on thaw.
Now it’s getting freezing in here again. The Huskies seem to be missing an important point: No matter the (debatable) short-term benefit they might see in bailing, the optics of it are far more lasting. They’re going to be seen as the ones who sabotaged the series.
If Sprinkle walked into athletic director Pat Chun's office and proposed curtailing the series, and I'm Chun, I say, “No. We’re Washington. We’re better than that.”
Except, unfortunately, the Huskies aren’t.