Dead Men Walking: WSU Gameday Roundup

Today's gameday roundup is going to be short for a variety of reasons. The first being that Ben Howland's irrelevant, dumpster fire, player abusing program will not be on TV tonight as the leftover remains of his team that haven't yet been ushered out the door by his horrendous personnel decisions and infuriating inaction take on the Washington State Cougars at Chianti Dan's garbage arena. Then there's the fact that this team is completely irrelevant and is no longer eligible to be in the top four places of this already pathetic conference and therefore have virtually assured themselves no realistic shot of making the tournament for the second time in three years.

Possibly the biggest reason of all is the malaise and bad vibes surrounding the program as a whole following SI's bombshell documenting the results of Dan Guerrero's scandal-ridden, no-accountability fun zone, allowing his employees to run amok and trash the legacy of our very own Coach Wooden. And for this, the man earns 700K a year.

The last obvious reason is that this looks like yet another uncompetitive and uninteresting game between two hapless clubs. Washington State sits in 8th place in the conference at 14-14 (6-10) so I suppose if things work out right, this could be a first round Pac-12 tournament preview. Goody. Because both teams are irrelevant and this game is mostly meaningless, there is almost nothing to actually "round up". Traditional news outlets will not waste time and space previewing this pathetic matchup.

The last meeting in Pullman, if you'll recall, was dominated in the first half by WSU's Brock Motum, spotting the Cougs a lead going into halftime before Howland finally relented and used zone to shut him down in the second. That was probably the last time this year we've seen it, but it's really hard to get upset about these kinds of points with all that we and the world now know about the real problems with our program. It took a big performance by Joshua Smith (19 points), still in his home state, to pull out a 3 point victory. That kind of singular dependence on such an unreliable player had better not be in the Bruins' Plan A, or they'll likely be quickly scrambling for Plan B.

For the truly masochistic, the game will be on radio at AM570.