Cougars prepare for Apple Cup like no other

Sep. 14—Jake Dickert understands the significance and life-changing effects a rivalry game can have.

He believes this because a day after leading the Cougs to their largest Apple Cup victory in school history in 2021 (Washington State 40, Washington 13), WSU dropped Dickert’s interim title and named him the full-time Cougar football coach.

“I don’t think (winning the 2021 Apple Cup will) ever be topped in my football coaching career, and what that meant in that time,” Dickert said. “Being this early in the season, I think (the Apple Cup) can continue to springboard us into the team that we want to become.”

WSU challenges UW at 12:30 p.m. today at Lumen Field in Seattle in the latest edition of the rivalry contest. The game will be streamed on Peacock.

Cougs vs. Huskies in rare September showdown

There’s a countdown clock in the Cougar Football Complex. It counts the days, hours and minutes until the Apple Cup.

This year, the clock hits zero in September, not November.

The 116th Apple Cup is the first to be played in September in Week 3 of the season versus the final week in November. It’s also the first since 1961 in which WSU and UW are not members of the same conference after UW joined the Big Ten, leaving WSU and Oregon State alone in the Pac-12, until this week when the conference began the process of adding four Mountain West schools.

With the game in an NFL stadium, ticket prices are higher than a college football game on campus with lower bowl seats at $300 and nosebleed seats at $100 as of Friday. The high prices do little to quell WSU fans’ displeasure in the fact that the game is taking place at all, much less in Seattle when it would have been held in Pullman this season had tradition been uninterrupted.

Lumen Field’s max capacity is over 68,000. Approximately 47,000 tickets had been sold as of Thursday with…


Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/cougars-prepare-apple-cup-no-121600463.html

Author : Lewiston Tribune, Idaho

Publish date : 2024-09-14 12:16:00

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