Apple Cup isn't the end-all

By Don Ruiz | The News Tribune • Published November 20, 2008

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For the first time since 1948, the Apple Cup will not end the regular season for either Washington or Washington State.

After these rivals meet for the 101st time on Saturday, the Cougars will go on to play their 13th and final game at Hawaii next weekend. Meanwhile, the Huskies will take a week off before ending their season Dec. 6 at California.

"It would be very nice to (play the Apple Cup last)," UW coach Tyrone Willingham said. "But ... this year we had some difficulty with the fact that we would have been playing 12 consecutive football games. We tried to find some relief in there, so we created some byes, and in doing so we did create the California game after the Apple Cup."

UW actually created three byes: one after the third game, another after the fifth, and the one next week after the 11th game.

This is the second consecutive season that the Huskies play on after the Apple Cup; last season, they went to Hawaii. But before that, Washington had concluded 57 of its previous 58 regular seasons against WSU. (The exception came in 2001, when the terrorist attacks caused UW and Miami to delay their game.)

Washington State has had more exceptions. The Cougars ended at UCLA in 2002, at Hawaii in 1999, and by playing Cal in Tokyo in 1987 when current coach Paul Wulff was a player.

Before 1949, UW-WSU meetings bounced all around the schedule.

Those days aren't expected to return, but season-ending Apple Cups could become less common.

"In the perfect world you would love to have that be the last game," Willingham said. "But I think that probably in the future, in creating some breaks in that 12-game schedule ... it may be difficult to get the Apple Cup game in the position where it is the last ball game."

The simplest way to accommodate bye weeks and a season-ending Apple Cup would be to move the game back to the last weekend of November or the first weekend of December.

However, WSU resists playing in Pullman during Thanksgiving week, when most students have left campus, or into a potentially frigid December. Both issues are less significant in Seattle, with its far larger population base and milder climate.