Happy Football Thanksgiving, Cougs, sadly but thankfully, our gridiron gang wraps up their season tomorrow, as the hated huskies come to town. It's been a frustrating and trying season for all of us, one that's had more twists and turns than a Martin Scorsese. While nobody anticipated us going 10-2, I would imagine not even the most pessimistic of fans saw us going 2-10.

I think the frustration of our fan base lies in three main things:

What the offense did last year and how many talented playmakers were returning. Plus sprinkling Leach into the equation and having him tout all Spring how quickly the offense was installed and grasped by the players. I think those two things created wildly unreal expectations, plus the fact Moos andCo. hyped the team (which they had to do to sell tix get and get us paid) since 12/7/11.

Anyways, before I jump into this week's picks, here is an update of our Pick Em League Standing. Nobody appears willing to catch Sean in the standings and he blazes the path to glory with 256 points, followed by How We Do at 250 and then in third, St Pete Cougs with 249 points. Congrats all, a helluva run for you Hawk!

To: The Football Gods

C/O The Pac-12 Conference and NCAA

Re: Mercy

Hey, Football Gods. It's me, Huddy. I know that this is a busy time of year for you, what with your reign over the Bowl Championship Series and determining which team will be bestowed your ultimate gift and all. (By the way, don't you think Notre Dame is a little on the nose?). I'm hoping you can spare a few moments for myself and the other Coug fans. I can't be alone in wondering just what it is I've done to earn your unrelenting wrath. I have many questions and one simple request for you. So if you don't mind, Football Gods, can you please click on the jump and see what I have to say?

Hello Followers.  Hope your Apple Cup week is off to a good start.

As for me, well, on Saturday I told you that I was looking for our Cougars to provide me with a much needed spark.

Instead, what I have received over the past few days from our Cougar sports teams has all-but doused all hope.

For more on that, as well as the reason why I still think Friday is worth watching, read on.

Hello Followers.  Hope you had a great week.

Well, yesterday proved to be an interesting one for Cougar Nation.  First, we received news that  funding for our 60+ million football operations building was approved by the Board of Regents. Then, we heard that we've completed the internal investigations of our football program. And then last night, our Hoopster Cougs went scoreless in the last 5 minutes of regulation en route to losing to Pepperdine in OT...

And my reaction to that?  Well, it kind-of-sort-of amounted to this...

And so, as I finished doing some morning work and sat down to write about the Cougs, I realized that my passion for all things Cougar needs a real, powerful spark.

So, to see whether I think our date with Sparky this afternoon will provide such a gift, then read on.

"Gotta keep the Devil, down in the hole..."

Welcome to the 2nd to last week of Cougar football. We are heading to the desert to take on Sparky’s Devils who find themselves with their once promising season on the rocks. Tempe is a place where, historically, Cougar dreams have gone to die. This season our dreams are already as dead as Julius Caesar, so we have that going for us. Since our bowl hopes went up in a mushroom cloud long ago, all we have left is to crush the fragile bowl hopes of one of our peers out of pure bitterness. After a promising start and an early top 25 ranking the Sun Devils are now teetering on the edge at 5-5. Can we help nudge them closer to the brink with an upset? Our blogfathers will weigh in with their thoughts and other Pac-12 picks below the fold...

Wow, what a week folks, huh? You know those before and after shots of how much presidents age during their terms? I feel like just about every Coug fan has some pretty dramatic before and after changes from just a week and a half ago. Since heralding the long-awaited return of good football to the Palouse after our moral blowout of Stanford, we have endured the Utah meltdown, our most prolific receiver ever quitting the team and leaving some pretty serious and potentially libelous allegations in his wake, and then the mother of all emotional rollercoaster rides during the UCLA game. So where do we stand? It appears that the team made an emphatic statement on Saturday night that coach Leach has not “lost” this team. They fought hard, and despite a special teams disaster the likes of which I have never seen, coupled with the loss of their starting QB and a HUGE halftime deficit, they were on-side kicking down one score as the game wound down. It was both bizarre and inspirational.

Still, it was a loss and a loss marred by so many cartoonish mistakes and breakdowns that it doesn’t quite give me confidence of anything heading into the final two games other than we will see effort. So how do we weary fans continue on this crazy train? I have just the thing after the jump.

Happy Saturday to you Followers.  Hope your weekend is off to a great start.

Well, after a week from HELL trying to find a car to replace my beloved beater.....

I am now ready to hit the keyboard to write and think a bit about the Cougs.  So, if you want to check out a few pre- UCLA related  thoughts, then please click on the jumperoo.

Time to Circle the Wagons!

Appropriately this week as our nation tore itself apart over who should be president, who should marry who and what you should be able to smoke, the Cougar nation launched into a full on family feud with players vs. coaches, reporters vs. coaches, fans vs. reporters, and plenty of blogger on blogger violence to boot. While the issues affecting our team have hardly been put to rest, our squabbles need to be for now because we have a very important game facing us this week. Its time to circle the wagons, put our helmets back on, lace up our cleats and get to work. Will the Cougs be able to bounce back from their week of turmoil and rally round their senior leaders? Will a fractured locker room and some key personnel losses be too much to overcome? Our blogfathers will weigh in with their  predictions after the jump...

Good morning and Hump Day, Cougs. I got nothin'. I really just don't have much to say about this stupid football season, so this will be brief. Even the least optimistic among us could have never imagined a scenario in which we'd be 2-7, our best player would have quit the team and worst of all, my fellow blogfathers and shotgunnin' buddies, Longball and LucasCoug would be lobbing passive-aggressive volleys at each other on This Here Blog. So where do we go from here? I really don't know. I do know this season is completely and utterly lost. You know where I was when the Cougs were getting throttled by Utah on Saturday? The golf course. I'd planned to be able to watch the second half, but that clearly became a waste of time so I just golfed some more and ignored the game completely. In my recollection, this has never happened to me. The days that followed kicked off the greatest meltdown in Cougar Nation since Mike Price skipped town for Tuscaloosa. Mercifully, I was on the road again yesterday and was too busy to read all about it like I typically would. This season has stripped me of my excitement for Cougar football, which is quite remarkable and quite sad. 

So what do we do? We support Jeff Tuel and Travis Long on their way out. These are two dudes who have laid their bodies on the line (quite literally in Tuel's case) to get their teeth kicked in for four years. They rarely produced results we would have liked in their careers, but they will be two of my favorite Cougs.

Accept that Mike Leach is our coach until he isn't. We all thought his approach would be a little more "quirky" than "my way or the highway", but apparently we were wrong. On the whole, it's hard to disagree with someone who thinks he needs to shake the loser mentality out of a bunch of kids who have done nothing but lose. That said, nobody can just go about doing things however the hell they want and expect to have the unfailing support of everyone. Should Leach's methods continue to cast a public negative light on the program, his methods will require some examination. If he gets "his guys" in town and starts winning ball games, we'll likely all forget about this ugly episode. If he doesn't, his proponents will get quieter and quieter until he is gone. I'm not saying we should support him blindly if he continues to act like a douche, but there really isn't much to be done about it so accept that he's driving he bus and understand he feels a total overhaul is necessary even if we didn't.

Stop yelling at each other. It's bumming me out.

And oh yeah, one last thing...beat UCLA.

Go Cougs. 

So this post originally started as a comment to Longball's post from earlier today, but morphed into such a long rant with multiple revisions, that I figured it deserved its own post!

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