Ask Michael Anything: Realignment and Week 1 vs. CSU

Over the summer, I made the tough (but necessary!) decision to end The CougCenter Hour podcast. Ten years of doing this show and finally other obligations were just too much. Interviews late in the evening are hard to get! Hosting a show on your own is hard!

But the one thing I heard from people that they’d miss: Ask Michael Anything. A fun segment I’m sure I borrowed the idea for from somewhere at the end of the show where people could ask me ... well ... anything!

So why not, with such robust demand from at least half a dozen people, continue a favorite on a semi-regular basis? I mean, I think it’s a good idea and I still have editing privileges on this website, so.

The CFP vote is a tough one because there’s a very good likelihood the Pac-12 loses their Autonomous 5 ranking because, with the Stanford Cardinal and Cal Golden Bears now likely departing for the ACC, it’s just the Washington State Cougars and Oregon State Beavers left. That designation is completely dependent on which institutions are members and, crimson Kool-Aid drinker though I may be, those two schools plus whatever else gets pieced together, Autonomous 5 it is not.

You can’t really leverage the vote itself into an invite; what you can leverage if you’re the Beavs and Cougs is a willingness to take less than a full share and the conference assets, which include an entire damn television network. Is that enough for the Big 12? Probably not.

As for the offense, I’m hopeful new offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle can find a way to keep Cam Ward from running for his life quite as much. Eric Morris’s Air Raid got to be a painful exercise in “not another tunnel screen, I beg of you” but we should acknowledge the limitations from how rough that offensive line could be at times.

Reports from camp through seem to be that the fresh crop of receivers are blocking better, the line looks not bad (depending on the health of Fa’alili Fa’amoe) and you’ve got Nakia Watson back again. All in all, “better” is probably a fair assessment since even with the system change, things won’t be entirely dissimilar.

What I’m most hopeful for with Cam is to just hit his receivers with accurate passes. We saw his accuracy take some dips last year; it seemed like Morris tried to move the pocket as well to help buy Ward some time to find an open receiver. I think it was evident to most anyone watching that Ward has all the physical tools, maybe more than any quarterback at WSU in the last decade or so. But it won’t do him any good if he can’t actually get passes to receivers on a consistent basis.

We’re going to be alright? Yeah, we will. We’ve always got each other. It sounds dumb, but it’s true. To a degree, over the last two months, I’ve never been more proud to be a Coug. It’s tough times that bring people together and they show who they truly are.

Lets hope “who they truly are” includes wallet opening by alums though history would certainly be an indication that they’ll stay closed.

Conferences aren’t just repositories for athletics teams, they’re also the schools you associate most closely with because of ... well, those sports teams. All your teams play one another most often and so the academic sides will also work more closely together on things like research, studies, etc. It’s also important to university presidents and writ large to the schools to be linked with institutions who have a good academic reputation.

Somewhat hilariously, I also forget at times that these schools are, yanno, schools. So they should school really well with other schools so their school isn’t schooled.

Or something.

We showed the world we don’t deserve it when we put up the blue heart and didn’t immediately blow it up with about 14 kilograms of dynamite. Probably overkill but best to make sure the job’s done a few yards into the earth’s crust.

This sounds like the start of a Divorce Lawyers for Men commercial you hear on every sports talk station and it worries me that I’ve been scouring the Revised Code of Washington looking for the loophole to ram this through the court system.

From UW specifically? I have a better chance of being named King of Sweden tomorrow. The answer isn’t zero to be clear, I’ve got just enough family still there but it’s a decimal point with the “1” positioned roughly one AU away.

That’s an “astronomical unit”. That’s 93 million miles. Why did I go with that measurement? Right, I’m a show off. At least I’m aware of it, okay?

From the state legislature though? A different story. We spent like we were going to be the Pac-12 forever because we had to but now, we won’t be. But the money for everything is still owed and there’s a small chance we all help pay for the difference. At least if WSU’s lobbyists in Olympia are worth their paychecks.

The Morrill Act Throwdown. The Pullvalis Showdown. The Corvallman Rundown.

Super into compound “down” words today.

In the fieldhouse, rotating booths of local restaurants that can handle mobile cooking out be great! If we’re going with permanent solutions though, I’m always in favor of Mexican food, especially since breakfast burritos are about the only “breakfast” food I’m over the moon for.

I’m absolutely a breakfast food for dinner guy. No idea why. Waffles and bacon at 8 p.m. hit different.

I don’t park their for football games or to run up to Murrow West to edit anymore so dig away!

Cruise ships in Seattle are a common sight every summer now. The tourists who descend on my beloved hometown clog up sidewalks surrounding every tourist trap, turn the wrong way up one-way streets in their rentals and wander aimlessly on sidewalks in Pioneer Square getting in my way as I sprint towards a Mariners game.

Nothing quite topped the man who, the other day, stood in the middle of an intersection looking at his phone for directions. And by “middle of the intersection” I truly do mean directly in the middle of the intersection as people wishing to go every direction absolutely blasted their horns at a man who had wandered into a massive street juncture in rush hour traffic and somehow came out unscathed not but for the grace of God.

That and Seattle drivers who have spent 120 years trying to get over their allergy to the throttle.