There’s one thing that all of us fans of the Washington State Cougars can get behind: That’s it’s really, REALLY freaking cool that our flag has flown on ESPN’s College GameDay more than 200 consecutive times and is now finally making its way to Pullman for WSU vs. the Oregon Ducks on Saturday.
Last year, to mark the 200th consecutive appearance, ESPN’s Tom Rinaldi told the story of Ol’ Crimson, the WSU flag that travels around the country to fly each and every Saturday morning. The spot is very cool, and covers the history of Ol’ Crimson: From the origins of Tom Pounds sewing together the original flag and flying it on Oct. 4, 2003, in Austin, Texas, to the now well-known story of the flag nearly not making it to Tucson, Ariz., in 2013.
About the only thing missing is Rinaldi following his usual M.O. and doing something to make everyone cry, but if you look real closely, you’ll see Pounds get a little tear in his eye as pride wells up inside him talking about the flag and what it means to him — and to us.
It’s a wonderful tribute to an awesome tradition that, at that point, had spanned 14 years and included some wins ... and a whole bunch of losses ... and now a whole bunch of winning.
They did make mention of whether the show actually will ever visit Pullman — which, by the way, was never mentioned during the spot as a purpose for waving the flag — and host Rece Davis said he was personally looking at WSU/Stanford in November 2017 as a possibility. To which Desmond Howard and Kirk Herbstreit chimed in, “gotta keep winning.”
That didn’t happen, as WSU lost to Arizona the week before, taking some shine off the matchup with the Cardinal.
But now it’s finally here.
(Oh, and apologies for the poor sound quality; my computer recording setup is pretty low-tech.)