Podcast Vs. The Classics: 1982 Apple Cup

There are a lot of old, famous Washington State Cougars football games that we, the co-hosts of Podcast Vs. Everyone, aren’t old enough to have watched live. Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, we can rectify that while we’re devoid of sports!

Up first this week: The 1982 Apple Cup, an epic 24-20 comeback upset of the No. 5 Washington Huskies.

The game had so many storylines:

• Washington needed just a win over the two-win Cougs to secure a Pac-10 championship and advance to the Rose Bowl.
• The Cougs had some serious revenge motivation after a loss in the previous year’s Apple Cup kept them out of the Rose Bowl.
• It was the first Apple Cup to be played in Pullman since 1954.
• Don James brought a 6-0 record against WSU into the game.

Here are coach Jim Walden’s recollections of the game, via this 1999 story by Bob Condotta:

The seeds for the 1982 upset actually dated to the previous year, when the Huskies had beaten the Cougars in Seattle to knock WSU out of the Rose Bowl and then went to Pasadena themselves.

”That was such a tough blow for us,” Walden said. “We would have all been better off if we had won in 1981 and they had won in 1982.”

That defeat haunted the Cougars throughout the summer, and when the 1982 season started and WSU started to lose a myriad of both players and games, beating the Huskies soon became all that was left. The Cougars lost 13 starters or key reserves to injury that year, some of whom began to get healthy late in the season.

”We really weren’t as bad a team as our record indicated that year,” Walden said.

Meanwhile ...

“We had already divvied up our Rose Bowl tickets,” said Danny Greene, a UW receiver from 1980-84. “I had already switched tickets with a few people who weren’t going to use theirs. We knew we were going to beat them.”

And it ended like this:

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