Reporters who helicopter, or wagon-train, into Pullman for one-off interviews invariably find Mike Leach amusing, irreverent, original and iconoclastic, especially for his industry. However, reporters who deal with the Washington State football on a regular basis often find him circumspect, contentious and surly. And, often, late.

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In the final Husky Stadium game of the season, the Washington football team said goodbye to 23 of coach Chris Petersen’s earliest and most accomplished recruits, hello to elite LT Trey Adams and slammed the door in Oregon State’s face.

The pregame senior ceremony lasted far longer than any suspense over the outcome. So did Adams’ welcome return from injury purgatory.

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Washington's 27-23 survival win over Stanford Saturday night at Husky Stadium vaulted the Huskies (7-3, 5-2) back into the latest Associated Press college football poll Sunday at 20th, a week after a 12-10 loss at Cal dropped them from the top 25. Washington State (8-1, 5-1), following a 19-13 win over Cal at Pullman, stayed put at No. 10. The Cougars were eighth in the first College Football Playoffs rankings released last week.

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The cold wind off Lake Washington Saturday night was no match for the heat coming from Jake Browning.

For a while, anyway.

Furious over a benching for two series in an upset loss at Cal a week earlier, Browning turned his anger into two of the best drives of Washington's season. But after the adrenaline that powered a 21-0 halftime lead dwindled, the Huskies found themselves hanging on for dear life against relentless Stanford that, for want of an extra point, probably would have prevailed.

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The season's first College Football Playoff rankings are out and, to the astonishment of the known sports world, the Washington State Cougars are eighth. WSU at 7-1 has its highest ranking ever in the five-year history of the format, produced by a selection committee.

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On the Monday after Jake-gate, Chris Petersen went through a predictable effort of defending his decision to switch quarterbacks mid-game Saturday in a contest Washington led.

The Huskies coach said bailing on Jake Browning for two series against Cal wasn't about him as much as the bad offense as a whole. He said backup Jake Haener, a redshirt freshman, has done well in practice. He said he's changed players at all positions over the course of the season.

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Chris Petersen said he wanted to "shake things up," he said, by benching in the third quarter his four-year starting quarterback, Jake Browning. The Huskies coach succeeded. Whether Washington (6-3, 4-2) will stop shaking is the test for the rest of a season that turned abruptly to disappointment Saturday night in Berkeley.

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Beyond the 27-13 win over Colorado, news kept getting better for Washington football over the weekend. Later on Saturday, Washington State throttled Oregon 34-20 in Pullman, prompting a drain on statewide liquor sales that likely kept many UW players and most of Western Washington sober Saturday night.

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It's easier to find to a Husky vacationing in Pullman than to find one who will admit to an emotional hangover from the overtime loss in Eugene the previous Saturday. But after falling behind 7-0 in the first quarter Saturday at Husky Stadium to Colorado, and struggling to a 14-13 halftime lead, it was plain some Washington hearts were left broken in the Willamette Valley.

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The seventh-ranked Washington football team went toe to toe with No. 17 Oregon for 59 minutes and 57 seconds in a classic at Autzen Stadium in Eugene Saturday, losing several key players along the way but somehow putting itself in position for a hugely satisfying victory. Unfortunately for the Huskies, their foot failed them.

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Ahead of the most significant game of the season so far, the Huskies lost two defenders to retirement because of medical problems. Junior CB Austin Joyner has had multiple concussions, and junior DE Jared Pulu has a chronic kidney condition.

“Those are hard things, but they are in great care right now,” coach Chris Petersen told reporters after practice. “They will stay with us and always be part of us."

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The notion of QB Jake Browning as a runner tends to scare Huskies football fans because his four-year tenure has produced some vivid moments not unlike a giraffe falling down stairs. But without his critical rushes Saturday night, the Washington victory drought against UCLA in Pasadena would have added a 24th year.

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In the final seconds of the first half, after the Huskies missed a short field goal to keep their lead at 14-0, BYU was in desperate search for a way to avoid irrelevance. Instead, they ran into Mr. Irrepressible.

Actually, LB Ben Burr-Kervin caught them from behind. The national defensive player of the week roared up along the sideline behind RB Lopini Katoa as he crossed the BYU 20.

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Against Arizona State, a team that has beaten Washington 11 of the previous 12 meetings -- including a 13-7 loss a year ago in Tempe that was the Huskies' most inexplicable game of the 2017 season --  nothing can taken for granted, and every good thing must be cherished.

So despite a stylistically modest outcome, which began with an immodest dumpster-fire play, the 27-20 triumph Saturday night (box) at Husky Stadium was vital.

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For a game that 10th-ranked Washington seemed to control -- no easy feat with Salt Lake City's altitude and attitude in a sellout crowd at Rice-Eccles Stadium -- peril seemed perpetually imminent. Particularly after one of the most egregious turnovers in the four-year career of Jake Browning.

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For a 45-3 win (box) that included 632 yards, you can argue it's a stretch to say that the University of Washington's offense was often crappy. But that's because you were not present in person, nor in front of a screen, to see how the Huskies handled themselves Saturday against North Dakota, a program that is to big-time college football what Justin Bieber is to low-post play in basketball.

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By the time of the December reckoning for the 2018 college football season, the details of how Auburn beat Washington 21-16 (box) on Sept. 1 likely will be forgotten by the NCAA playoff committee members and bowl selectors. They won't be forgotten by Huskies coach Chris Petersen.

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In terms of scandal-o-rama, the NCAA is running a distant second to the Trump administration. But since part of the NCAA's mission includes seeing to the welfare of students, they shouldn't even be in the "also receiving votes" listing in a top-25 poll of American institutions.

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A few months after his national nonfiction best-seller, The Boys in the Boat, was published in 2014, Seattle author Daniel James Brown was showing a friend around the Conibear Shell House on the University of Washington campus. They looked at the trophies accrued over decades by successful Huskies teams, and gazed upon the legendary Husky Clipper, the shell used to win gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics under the grim glare of Hitler.

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What Nate Robinson said Monday about being offered $100,000 by a booster to keep playing football instead of basketball for the University of Washington was less of a revelation and more of a tradition. And we all know how big tradition is for college football.

Huskies boosters were doing this long before Robinson's father, UW running back Jacque Robinson, was born. Ask Hugh (The King) McElhenny.

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