Bill Oram: Coach Prime and Colorado are in Eugene, but I’m going to Pullman
Sounds like any sportswriter with a pulse is gonna be in Eugene this weekend.
Coach Prime. Nike. Ratingzzz.
If that’s the case, somebody better call a doctor. Check my vitals. Press two fingers into my wrist and give it a 60-count.
You all can have Colorado-Oregon. I’m going to Pullman.
I’m choosing substance over spectacle. Emotion over commotion.
College football has never given us a game like the one that Oregon State and Washington State will wage on Saturday afternoon. Or, more accurately, we have never had so much taken away that a game like this was all that remained.
The Left Behind Bowl? The Pac-2 Championship?
It’s the Truce on the Palouse and we’ve never seen anything like it.
Not where the game-week buildup included a joint Zoom news conference with administrators appearing in front of a co-branded backdrop in a stand of institutional solidarity.
Not with a pledge that the home marching band would play the visitors’ fight song before kickoff.
Not with the famed flyers of Ol’ Crimson, ever-present on “College GameDay,” reserving a place in the sky to wave a Benny banner, too.
No question that Oregon hosting the most talked-about team in the country is a special occasion. Any other weekend I’d be right there alongside my fellow scribes, our hearts all pounding at a robust and physician-approved 60 to 100 beats per minute.
But with Oregon favored by 21 points, what is there to really see at Autzen?
Deion’s sunglasses? Celebrities?
Relative to the fight for survival on tap in Pullman, that all feels cheap. Hollow. Empty calories. And it’s my responsibility to go where the best story is.
If you contend that Deion vs. the Ducks is the biggest thing going down this Saturday in the college football universe, I won’t argue.
But did you ever see a movie called “The Paper”? Ron Howard directed. Michael Keaton starred. You’d like it.
In
it, the ink-stained Keaton blares at a condescending rival, “I don’t live in
the (expletive) world, I live in New York (expletive) City.”
Cue that energy here.
I don’t live in “the college football universe.” I live in (expletive) Oregon, and in Oregon people are hurting over the death of the Pac-12. They’re angry. They’re sad.
I hear from them every day.
I know people in Washington who feel the same.
In those places — right here — something is being taken away. By realignment. But TV execs. What’s being sacrificed at the altar of media rights is a piece of those fans’ identities.
And Saturday’s game in Pullman will double as a rally, with prideful partisans declaring, “Uh-uh, you can’t have it.”
God, I love the fight.
The heart of college football is the fans. The students. The alumni. The below-zero tailgaters.
Oregon fans, I know, are no less passionate about their Ducks than Beavers fans or Cougs. And many of them are unsettled about the leap to Big Ten, too. But they have trips to the Big House and the Horseshoe to plan for. They have a future rich with heavyweight matchups, national exposure and an endless bounty of cash.
What do Beavers and Cougars fans have to look forward to after this season? At the moment, it is an abyss of uncertainty.
That’s why what their football teams have delivered so far this season is so significant.
The Beavers are 3-0, ranked 14th in the country and have dreams of upending the whole broken enterprise by winning the last Pac-12 crown.
Washington State is also undefeated. Knocked off No. 19 Wisconsin a couple of weeks back. The Cougs, now ranked 21st in the country, have plenty to prove, too.
Maybe it’s the Tillamook County in me that I’m more drawn to the plights of Oregon State and Wazzu than the shimmer and shine of Prime and the Swoosh.
When I heard Oregon State president Jayathi Murthy speak up on behalf of rural Oregonians on Thursday and say, “To write off small communities is completely unacceptable,” I couldn’t help but pump a fist in support.
Of the institutions that killed the Pac-12 and left Washington State and Oregon State literally flapping in the Saturday morning wind, I hear the words of my guy Prime: “They made it personal.”
I love that the Cougars’ firebrand coach, Jake Dickert, has lost his voice screaming for respect. And I admire just as much that OSU coach Jonathan Smith has taken the opposite approach, choosing his words carefully and taking the fight to the football field.
Whatever happens on Saturday in Pullman isn’t going to determine how realignment ultimately shakes out for Oregon State and Washington State. It won’t dictate whether these schools scramble in tandem to the Mountain West or reassemble a zombie Pac-12.
That is all for the boardrooms, courtrooms and joint Zooms.
What we will have instead when those schools connect on Saturday will be about the humanity of football, fandom and identity.
You can have the game of the week in Eugene, if you want it.
I’ll be at the game of a lifetime.
-- Bill Oram boram@oregonian.com Twitter: @billoram
