“A Lot of Old Ideas aren’t the Same”: The Last of the Apple Cups?

One of the best themes in college sports fandom is geographic rivalry. Players, coaches and rules change every year, but the clash between sporting neighbors spans centuries and inspires outsized inflammation. Few have expressed the passion better than Jim Walden.

“Nothing in my job,” said the Washington State coach ahead of the 1982 Apple Cup against Washington, “not the Rose Bowl, not the Holiday Bowl, nothing — is more important than beating the University of Washington.”

Hyperbolic? Well, of course. That was how Walden rolled. But it reflected an amusing attitude during simpler times. Fans were enamored with the city slickers/country cousins trope and the various mockeries it induced. The matchup, always at the November end of the regular season, sometimes had stakes with national implications and fields with snow angels. It was custom among sissy Huskies fans to drive east from Puget Sound in vehicles packed with food and equipment sufficient to withstand a modern Donner Pass calamity. Cougars fans drove tractors west to Seattle to enjoy how traffic lights changed colors.

That was then. This is now.

Here’s how Huskles coach Jedd Fisch put it this week ahead of the 117th Apple Cup Saturday in Pullman.

“College football is so completely different than it once was,” he said. “A lot of old ideas aren’t the same.”

Like the quaint notion of wretched Apple Cup weather (Saturday’s forecast: 85 degrees and sunny. Bleah.). Or a Pac-12 Conference with familiar rivals. Or kickoffs at 12:30 instead of 8 p.m. (how does the “greatest setting in college sports” work in the dark?).  Or rosters that rarely have more than a quarter of the players from state high schools.

More pragmatically for Saturday, how about the old idea of the Cougars often punching above their weight?

A year ago, the Cougars stunned the favored Huskies 24-19 at Lumen Field, and are 2-2 in the past four meetings. But last Saturday they traveled to Denton, TX, and lost 59-10 to North Texas. Explanations for how the 2-0 Cougars fell that far, that fast, to a low-profile team awaits forensic results from the football coroner’s office.

Or maybe not. Maybe this is closer to the new normal outcome, a natural cause because of the new system in big-time college sports that allows schools to share revenues directly with players, who also get paid for endorsements and appearances, and are allowed to transfer to schools offering more money. The primary negative consequence is that schools with smaller budgets will see their on-field competitiveness shrivel. The new system helped atrophy the old Pac-12 and caused WSU athletics director Pat Chun to bolt Pullman for the same job at the relatively healthy Montlake school.

Huskies bosses have said they will raise this year the maximum allowable amount of $20.2 million from media sources and donor (NIL) money, which will go primarily to the football team. The Cougars will be hard-pressed to raise half of that.

These developments don’t mean the industry is going broke. Not at all. The money paid in media rights fees is astounding, as are ratings for big-brand games. What it means is that schools with lesser revenues and larger debt are in big trouble.

Here’s one quick way to look at it: After the Apple Cup, the Huskies’ next opponent is defending national champion Ohio State. The Buckeyes’ athletic department reported after the 2023-24 season gross revenues of $251 million, which led the NCAA. Fourth among public schools was Big Ten Conference rival Michigan at $240 million. Washington was 25th ($145M), Washington State 53rd ($55M) and Oregon State 54th ($53M). The gap grows when the expense of building top-shelf facilities is factored, the debt service on which is handled with alacrity by the big schools and with agony by smaller schools. 

Followers of my scribblings at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Sportspress Northwest may recall my enduring advocacy for paying players over the table, and beyond scholarships, for their contributions to campus life. I remain firm in the belief. My beef is with the college officials who ignored the klaxons when the International Olympic Committee in 1986 ended the long-term charade of amateurism in sports. Instead, the NCAA for the next 33 years was the only sports-governance agency in the world to perpetuate the fraud.

When a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2019 came down harder on the NCAA than North Texas against WSU, the old ideas Fisch alluded to went into free fall. Running a crooked shop was not the idea of the TV networks. The current debacle came from faulty campus business leadership that created the tumult of the subsequent years that continues today. 

The current inequities between the haves and have-nots foreshadow a future that seems inevitable — creation of competitive tiers that likely will start at the top with a combined Southeastern Conference and Big Ten. That’s largely why Washington and Oregon joined USC and UCLA in abandoning the old Pac-12 for the Big Ten. The NCAA’s inability to recognize its own legal and philosophical futility delayed the reckoning until this decade, when chaotic reform seems to be everything everywhere all at once.

Even among some of the 34 teams in the hypothetical super-conference, there is scant security. UCLA was so embarrassed Saturday by a 35-10 loss to New Mexico, which dropped the Bruins’ record to 0-3 that DeShaun Foster, a former star running back, was fired, 15 games into his head-coaching career. The Bruins’ lackluster fanbase for football relative to USC is being cited as a part of the reason the department has had a running deficit of up to $200 million — despite receiving a full share, about $70 million, of the Big Ten’s annual media rights fee. Washington gets a half share. WSU is hardly alone.

Worse, the increase in financial neediness of some athletics programs is less likely to receive help from their schools’ general budgets. The Trump administration’s threats to halt or claw back for political reasons previous commitments of federal money to colleges is destined to have a calamitous effect on some schools. Not to mention the denials of admission to some international students, whose families often pay full tuition, helping ease the financial obligation for American-born kids.

As for how all of this big-picture information applies to the little Apple Cup, consider that this is the second meeting as part of a five-game agreement between the schools following the realignment that crippled the Pac-12. Will the Huskies renew the deal, when they could gain more from a sexier non-conference game? If the financial disparity grows, will WSU, 20.5-point underdogs Saturday, want to be part of an inevitable mismatch? 

After the Cougars upset the Huskies 26-22 in the 2005 Apple Cup, WSU linebacker Will Derting observed, “It doesn’t matter if you have a 1-10 season. Beating the Huskies is everything.”

Enjoy Saturday, Will — the Huskies are 20.5-point favorites — and the next three Apple Cups. After that, the chance at “everything” could end up being nothing.