Beat Journal #5

After getting beat down by Washington – again – the Beavers staged a second-half rally to beat Washington State on Saturday night in Pullman.
Christian Caple of the “The UWDaily” had an interesting take on the 79-60 Husky win last Thursday night. It seems that, even though the final score was not close, Husky fans were a bit nervous as halftime approached with the Beavers leading 29-25.
He spent over half the article talking about an alley-oop pass that Quincy Dentmon threw down to bring Washington to 29-27 late in the first half. Apparently, that was the play that woke the Huskies up and they never looked back.
The article is very well written. In fact, it’s seems good enough to not be just for a college paper. It was good stuff, using good quotes and really getting the feel for a game that, if you just looked at the score, would have seemed like a mundane 19-point win for the first place team in the Pac-10.
It was Kevin Dudley of the Daily Evergreen in Pullman that wrote about the Beavers’ comeback win on Saturday. His article is not nearly as strong at Caple’s in Seattle. The lead was wordy and it didn’t seem to get to the heart of the game – the comeback – until over halfway through the story.
He suffered from “Timeline –itis.” His story does start at the end of the game, but then goes back to the start of the game and is a chronological look at how the Beavers came back with a 18-1 run, turning an 11-point deficit into a six-point lead.
Their website did something cool though. The photo that accompanies the story is placed at the top left corner of the screen. When you roll the mouse over the photo, the caption appears. Kind of a cool way to present it I thought.
As far as the Oregonian, Paul Buker writes what it called “Behind the Beat” for the Beavers every day. It’s a great read. I have commented on this before, but it’s great when a columnist decides to write about behind the scenes stuff and not just “game notes” before a game.
Buker writes in today’s Oregonian about the Beavers’ upcoming home game with Stanford. Remember, OSU went down there and took it to the Cardinal 77-62 last month. New Cardinal head coach Johnny Dawkins doesn’t want to see that again.
Buker feels that the Cardinal will make some necessary adjustments to the back-door cuts the Beavers beat the Cardinal with in January. However, his (and Coach Robinson’s) stance is that it’s too hard to change your way of play this far into the season.He’s probably right – look for a Beaver win tonight.