Ringing in the new year with Twain, pigskin

More than 150 years ago the brilliant Mark Twain wrote a New Year’s Day column for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, in which he posited this gem, as true today as it ever was: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community.

How can you follow that? Of course he also famously said “Golf is a good walk spoiled,” which duffers the world over can relate to.

What would Twain think of today’s sports landscape? Let’s see if a few of his most famous quotes shed any light.

“Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.”

There are a lot of Idaho Vandal alumni and fans in the panhandle, many still basking in the glow of the 61-50 beating their beloved Black and Gold hung on Colorado State on the blue ice rink in Boise.

How cool was it to watch Coeur d’Alene’s Deon Watson Jr. getting a chance to showcase his talents before a national television audience, then promptly blipping on the radar of NFL scouts with an eye-popping 140 yard receiving night?

It was a long-overdue feeling of joy for the Vandals, whose foray into FBS football hasn’t had many. But before fans start signing petitions to remain a Division I football program, or soliciting the Mountain West Conference for a home after dispatching both their Rams and Rebels this season, please take a quick second and thank the venerable Big Sky Conference for offering your team a viable future home, albeit with an FCS address.

Big Sky power Eastern Washington beat Washington State 45-42 in the season opener, the same Washington State team that went on to beat Idaho 56-6 before reeling off seven straight Pac 12 wins. EWU also beat Oregon State a few years ago, and managed to score 94 points in a pair of close losses the past two years against Washington and Oregon, but that doesn’t mean they should move up a division.

It was a fun season to be a Vandal fan, and hopefully there’s an encore bowl performance in the Sun Belt swan song in 2017. But better days, and tough regional competition, will be waiting in the Big Sky Conference, along with a chance to play for national titles.

“All generalizations are false, including this one.”

Moving west nine miles into Washington, is there a tougher team, and coach, to figure out than the Cougars and Mike Leach?

Las Vegas certainly whiffed, although in the grand scheme of things, they should be sending Coach Leach a bonus kickback for the amount of money his team made them.

The opening betting line for the tilt between WSU and Minnesota had the Cougars favored by 10 points. The over/under was 61 points, as most expected the Air Raid offense to score points.

Minnesota then suspended 10 players, three of whom were starting DBs, and enough wagers went down to swing the point spread to 15 by kickoff.

Of course, the Gophers and Vegas had the last laugh in the 17-12 snoozer. So did those who bet the under.

One minute Leach’s teams can’t beat an FCS opponent, the next they’re rolling through Pac 12 play like a bulldozer, the next laying an egg on national TV to end the season. Consistently inconsistent.

Heck of a sound bite though, that Coach Leach, and give him credit for building a winner in the Palouse.

“Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we’d all have frozen to death.”

Memo to Vandal football players: When it’s 15 degrees out with a nice crisp wind howling, when announcers are talking about it being one of the coldest games in bowl history, and when you half expect to see the old Boise Blades hockey team come skating out onto the blue ice, please don’t dump ice water on your poor coach until the final seconds are ticking off the clock.

My back got cold at home just watching as Paul Petrino turned into a popsicle after getting doused with the obligatory Gatorade bath with two minutes and change left in the Potato Bowl. Little did anyone know that there were still a couple of scores, possession changes, timeouts, commercial breaks and long video reviews still to go before the final second ticked off the clock like molasses in winter.

If those last couple minutes felt like an eternity, imagine how they felt to the teeth-chattering Petrino?

Then again, considering it was his first bowl win as a head coach, and one of the biggest wins in long time for the program he just rebuilt from the ground up, maybe he wasn’t feeling anything at all.

Here’s hoping he gets another ice cold bucket dumped on him next season, but in one of those sunny and warm bowls.

“A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.”

Aw, enough Mark Twain quotes. Happy New Year to the lot of you.

Eric Plummer is the sports editor of the Daily Bee in Sandpoint. For comments, suggestions or story ideas, he can be reached at eplummer@bonnercountydailybee.com.