Washington-Washington State playing for pride in Apple Cup

My mission, had I chosen to accept it, was to head north and west, to the target-rich environment of the 2008 Apple Cup, where the only thing worse than the puns -- "Full of Worms," and "Crapple Cup" blared two recent headlines -- would be ... the football.

Good news for those in the habit of slowing down to have a leisurely gander at car accidents: Fox Sports has made the Apple Cup, which kicks off in Pullman at noon, its national TV game. In what amounts to one more insult in a season replete with them, the 1-10- Washington State Cougars are 4 1/2-point underdogs to the 0-10 Washington Huskies, who have not won a game in a calendar year. This meeting of misbegotten squads reminds me of the 1983 Repus Bowl (that's Super, spelled backward), a battle of the 1-11 Houston Oilers and the 1-11 Tampa Bay Buccaneers. A timeless passage crafted by my former colleague Steve Wulf applies to this Saturday's Pileup on the Palouse:

"Yes, this was the Small One, the battle of the beatens, the movable object meeting the resistible force. There were only tomorrows. When these two teams get together, nothing can happen. This game was for a marble."

If it were a movie, the '08 Apple Cup would be Son of Frankenstein, the logical heir to what has stood, for the last quarter century, as the worst Division I football game ever played in the Pacific Northwest. Contested in Old Testament rains, the 1983 Oregon-Oregon State game was played to a 0-0- tie. It lives in infamy as the Toilet Bowl.

At least those two teams combined for four wins. Unable to handle the prosperity of its lone victory this season, a 48-9 decision over I-AA Portland State, the Cougs surrendered 63, 28, 66, 69, 58, 59 and 31 points in their subsequent seven losses.

The news hasn't been all bad. In a 69-0 whitewash at the hands of USC -- the day Washington State's 280-game scoring streak came to an end -- the Cougars blocked an extra point. They can build on that!

The truth, of course, is that the news has pretty much been all bad. The Cougars have been so compromised by serious injuries to two of their quarterbacks that coach Paul Wulff resorted to holding open tryouts for the position.

The Huskies lost star quarterback Jake Locker to a broken thumb at the end of September; earlier this week, lame duck head coach Ty Willingham announced that Locker is done for the year.

My mission was to "have fun" with the '08 Crapple Cup, to make sport of the efforts of the Huskies and Cougs. Because, you know, they're losers. They have it coming, right?

And then my phone rang, and it was Mesphin Forrester, Washington's fifth-year cornerback, a guy I remembered from last season when he returned an interception 54 yards for a touchdown against USC. He was coming off the practice field. He'd gotten the message that I wanted to talk to some players. I could hear voices behind him -- loud, energetic, hopeful, upbeat voices. What was up with that?