Tyrone Willingham's passionless propriety shouldn't carry over to UW-WSU rivalry game

PULLMAN — First of all, I realize that in many circles, today's Apple Cup is being looked upon as a contest with all the ferocity of Marcia Cross and Teri Hatcher swinging purses at each other in "Desperate Housewives."

Ah, but disparage not. The game has its own little quirkiness to it. It's the two-headed calf that no doubt our kids and grandkids will be gawking over decades from now, wondering what to make of it.

Maybe they'll have more luck at that than we're having.

At any rate, it's a rivalry game, and even if it's a competition to determine who's least ugly, it's our rivalry, and it's all we've got.

No, it's not Ohio State-Michigan, but, short of North and South Korea, what is? This week, Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh, a former Wolverine, talked about what rivalry week was like under the late Bo Schembechler.

"It was like you were preparing for that game 365 days a year," said Harbaugh. "It showed up in a lot of ways. That was the game you prepared for in winter conditioning, spring drills, two-a-days.

"Bo made sure the Michigan offense incorporated some of the Ohio State running plays, so the defense would get used to seeing them all year long. The signs in the building ... it was a yearlong thing for him."

No Huskies coach would ever get that frothy about the Cougars, of course. But the hallmark of the best WSU coaches is that their blood pressure roiled up whenever they talked about the Huskies.

That's where today's game comes in.

It has been repeated often this week that first-year coach Paul Wulff will have his alma mater ready to play. Maybe people remember that in 1989 he returned to center against Washington with his insides still growling from having his appendix removed 18 days earlier.

More likely, they recall his introductory news conference last December, when he said, "Dogs bark. Cougars hunt and kill."

If that popular wisdom is correct, this might be the real issue for the 101st Apple Cup: Can Tyrone Willingham measure up as a motivator, just for one day?

There's little doubt that Washington, despite not having sniffed a victory since before last Thanksgiving, is better than WSU. It has at least a few more quality athletes, and it's more physical.

That ought to matter. It won't if Willingham can't get the Huskies to play like their monthly scholarship checks are at stake. The sense here is that, for all the good the man has done in getting guys to go to class and keeping their names off the police blotter, he couldn't motivate a homeless man toward a Sunday dinner.

Much like the overall reversal of Willingham's admirable record at Stanford, his performance in rivalry games has gone belly-up. He beat California all seven years on the Farm, but never came close to USC while at Notre Dame or to Oregon while at Washington. And he's lost two of three to the Cougars.

Remember the first of those three? The Cougars won in the last couple of minutes, and receiver Jason Hill led a band of crimson brothers to midfield at Husky Stadium, where they commenced a stomp on the purple W.

In response, Washington defensive tackle Manase Hopoi marshaled some teammates and there was a brief dust-up. It wasn't college football's most mannerly moment, but neither was it Miami-Florida International, 2006.

Willingham seemed as piqued by his team's reaction as anything, saying, "There's no place for that in Husky football or in college football."

Beyond that, nothing. No "We're going to remember that," or "They'll never do that again to us." Just sort of a general, all-purpose hand-wring.

Juxtapose that with an observation made a couple of weeks ago by Washington offensive coordinator Tim Lappano after a fairly spirited effort against Arizona State.

"We had some swagger I've never seen in the locker room since I've been here," said Lappano. "I loved it."

Lappano was drawing no overt comparisons to anything. But he's spent much of his coaching career under Dennis Erickson. Think somewhere in the back of Lappano's mind, he wasn't feeding on the memory of some of Erickson's roguish teams?

In the Pac-10's weekly news release comes this advisory: In Willingham's four years at Washington, the Huskies have yet to commit as many as 10 penalties in a game, a fairly shocking consistency of comportment. Some Erickson teams got 10 by halftime, half of those in personal fouls.

Of course, it was also Erickson, in a meeting room in a downtown Seattle hotel a day after losing to Washington in 1987, who steamed: "Every night when I go to bed this next year, I'm going to ask myself: What did I do today to beat the Huskies?"

And remember, Paul Wulff was a member of Erickson's WSU teams.

Somewhere between Erickson's ne'er-do-wells and Willingham's propriety, there must be a happy medium for today's Washington locker room.

A pulse would be a good place to start.

Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com