Cougs fall one miracle short

PASADENA, Calif. — With the dawn of a new year, Washington State’s charmed 1997 football season Thursday came to a quiet end.

A serious, efficient University of Michigan team counteracted the Cougars’ season-long magic and almost certainly wrapped up a national championship with its 21-16 victory before 101,219 spectators in the 84th Rose Bowl.

It was more or less the outcome that oddsmakers had foreseen, and that Michigan had so carefully blueprinted. Yet to the thousands of Washington State fans who had flown, bused and hitchhiked to Pasadena for the Cougars’ first Rose Bowl appearance in 67 years, the loss was something of a shock.

The Cougars, particularly quarterback Ryan Leaf, had taught these fans to expect the implausible.

Leaf passed for 331 yards and triggered a desperation drive into Michigan territory before Cougar reality, two or three months later than usual, finally arrived. The clock expired.

That turned out to be the key measure — the clock. If Washington State’s Pac-10 opponents had occasionally been cavalier in their time management, these title-minded Midwesterners stingily controlled the ball and the clock in the fourth quarter.

Remarkably, with 30 seconds remaining in the game, WSU could boast of only one possession since the start of the fourth period.

So the Cougars finish one of their best seasons ever with 10 wins and two losses, and have now lost two of their three Rose Bowl games. WSU’s most recent participant in the most illustrious of bowls, on the first day of 1931, lost 24-0 to Alabama.

It also seems likely the Cougars will lose Leaf, who has scheduled a news conference for this morning to announce whether he will forfeit his senior season to turn professional.

The Cougars’ consolation was that, unlike the 1930 team with which they were so often compared, they provided as much drama in loss as they did in victory.

This story was published in the Jan. 2, 1998, edition of the Lewiston Tribune.