Apple Cup | Washington State one loss from joining college football history's most bumbling losers

If you're the sort who slows down to look at pileups on the side of the highway, by all means, pull up a chair. If you're the kind who wouldn't mind owning one of those haunting, old hearses from the '60s, instead of shuddering at the prospect, we can help.

This is an attempt to put into historical perspective Washington State's forgettable football season. Which is to say, it's an attempt to mix not only apples and oranges, but eras, leagues and levels of play.

It's all but impossible.

Ahead of Saturday's Apple Cup, it appears reasonable to suggest that the Cougars are the worst team in the history of the Pac-10 and its predecessors. They seem to be at the vortex of a perfect storm of futility on both sides of the ball — one piling indignity upon the other — and injuries that have sabotaged continuity.

Win the game against Washington — even though the Huskies are 0-10 — and the Cougars could argue they're removed from the discussion. After all, 10 teams have gone winless in the Pac-10 in its current form since 1978, and they wouldn't be one of them.

On the other hand, lose that game, and the finale at Hawaii, and WSU would be 1-12, and it's hard to ignore that they should draw mention as one of history's worst major-college teams.

They've given up 58 points or more six times, they're only 33 points from the big-school record of 566 allowed, and they've lost by a margin of almost 36 points a game — even with a countervailing blowout victory over lower-level Portland State.

It's exceedingly hard to compare teams from different eras. Today's teams are much more pass-oriented, offenses are far more sophisticated and blocking rules have been liberalized to favor offenses. So it's almost unfair to compare teams against anything but their contemporaries.

Not that we can't try. Here are some of the poor souls against which WSU can be measured:

Kansas State, 1962

It's difficult to single out a mere slice of K-State football as the worst, so inept has the program been historically. This is a place that went 7-68-2 from 1945-52; had losing seasons from 1955-67, and went 0-26-1 leading into Bill Snyder's turnaround tenure beginning in 1989, all of those 27 in pursuit of the program's elusive 300th victory.

But when the '62 Wildcats (0-10) took the field against Arizona on Nov. 10, they had scored exactly six points. They were shut out six of their first seven games. They finished with 39 points, allowing 28.3 a game.

"There was no way we could have done it at Kansas State in those years," says John Kadlec, an assistant coach then. "Football wasn't very important to that school at that time. I would say we had zero support from the administration. They were a great basketball school."

How bad was it in Doug Weaver's seven-year run (1960-66)? The Wildcats never scored a touchdown against rival Kansas.

Northwestern, 1981

Near the end of a 3-71-1 stretch — you read it right — Denny Green's first Wildcats team went 0-11, was shut out five times and was outscored 305-32 in its last five games. All this happened near the end of a 34-game losing streak.

No doubt, they were who he thought they were.

UTEP, 1973, 1978

For more on UTEP, see Kansas State.

From 1975-85, the Miners went 15-111. And that dark period might not have included their worst team, which could have been the one-year Tommy Hudspeth reign of '73, when they went 0-11, losing 62-14 to Idaho (which went 4-7) and 82-6 to Utah. They allowed 544 points with a slightly worse margin of defeat than WSU's.

Then in 1978, a 1-11 UTEP team was shut out six times.

"It wasn't hard to see they were struggling," says the defensive coordinator for that team, Bernie Ricono, talking about the offense. "We took it as a challenge: How many ways can you score on defense?"

Temple, 1993

This was probably the Owls' worst team in an era of decidedly bad ones, going 1-10. In one despicable five-game stretch, they allowed 297 points, including a 62-0 loss to a 4-7 Rutgers team. The win came by three points against 4-7 Eastern Michigan.

Eastern Michigan, 2002

The last Eagles team of Jeff Woodruff — son-in-law of ex-UW coaching great Don James — gets a free pass for its 3-9 record. But it coughed up that NCAA Division I-A record of 566 points, never giving up less than 32, and it played Southeast Missouri State and Southern Illinois.

"When I got there, there had been a junior-college type of situation [with recruiting]," says Woodruff. "We went in and had the philosophy of no junior-college kids. Within two years, all you have is young kids. You've got to be willing to bite the bullet and fight through that."

At Eastern Michigan, they weren't, which explains why Woodruff is now an assistant at UTEP.

Louisiana-Lafayette, 1997

Imagine the shellshock the Ragin' Cajuns felt on Nov. 8 in Pullman, when they lost 77-7 to WSU's Rose Bowl-bound team. Then again, maybe they were used to it. This 1-10 outfit holds the NCAA mark for points allowed per game at 50.3.

History's bad boys

Programs like Duke and Oregon State have had long sieges of bad football. OSU holds the NCAA record for consecutive losing seasons (28), from 1971 to 1998, and Duke put up three winless seasons in a six-year stretch from 1996 to 2001.

But neither has had one defining season of fall-through-the-ceiling, omigod, surpassing ineptitude. The stretches, though ... from 1979 to 1983, OSU lost 29 straight conference games.

A winning message

Ricono, the ex-UTEP assistant, now does radio color commentary for the Miners. Back in 1979, the program showed signs of emerging, then fell back into the old malaise and that staff was gone a year later. But Ricono has some thoughts that apply to UTEP or Kansas State or Paul Wulff, the first-year coach at WSU.

"If those kids are just running roughshod up there, going out drinking and fighting, then he's got problems," Ricono says. "After one year, he's got to take a look at himself and say, 'Do I have my base?' — the base being discipline — and then you can go forward."

Oh, and one other thing. Says Ricono, "I feel for him."

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