The Cougars have temporarily run out of healthy players, so the Apple Cup football game is among the latest victims of the rapidly spreading coronavirus ravaging the nation. The annual rivalry game between Washington and Washington State, scheduled for Friday, has been canceled.

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This Washington Huskies football team may have to be taken a little more seriously. As in Southeastern Conference seriously.

That's the land of giant offensive lines, versatile quarterbacks, ruthless defenders and layers of fast running backs. As well as coaches with some swagger.

Here's some samples of what rookie head man Jimmy Lake had to say after the 44-27 triumph (box) Saturday night broken over the heads of the Arizona Wildcats:

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The coronavirus took another bite out of the Pac-12 Conference football plan Friday when Washington State's game with Stanford Saturday was canceled after the Cougars fell below the 53-player scholarship minimum needed to play. Per new league rules, it was declared no contest.

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When the first long snap from the final college football team in America to start its season sailed deep into the rain, wind, and quiet gloominess of Husky Stadium, headed toward the worst possible outcome -- an opponent touchdown -- the curse of 2020 seemed to have settled in Montlake for a Saturday night of sardonic laughs.

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This could have been a fairly powerful University of Washington football team. Then the pandemic hit, spring practice was scrubbed, everything shut down for a while and the regular season now begins rather than ends in November.

Oh, yeah, 10 players with eligibility remaining have left the Husky program once the 2019 Apple Cup went into the books.

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The Pac-12 Conference was first to the hilltop, shouting warnings about Covid-19 and refusing to play. Then it was the last to the party, rejoining the rest of college football after conversion to a new biotech testing solution that promised a safe salvage of part of the season.

This week the conference discovered that there is still no defense against the infernal contagion. Swift, accurate testing didn't keep the Washington Huskies and Cal Bears from becoming the first in the conference to pay the price.

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The Pac-12 Conference, certain on Aug. 11 it wouldn't have a football season in 2020, instead released a seven-game schedule Saturday, including road openers Nov. 7 for both Washington schools, the Huskies at Cal and the Cougars at Oregon State.

As has become the recent custom, the Apple Cup will again be the day after Thanksgiving, this year Nov. 27 at Martin Stadium in Pullman. It will be the first rivalry game for both head coaches, UW's Jimmy Lake and WSU's Nick Rolovich.

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We assume University of Washington football coach Jimmy Lake made a wise choice of profession, particularly if his second choice was to become a public health official.

In a Zoom conference in mid-August, Lake's understanding of the unanimous decision by the Pac-12 Conference to abandon the 2020 football season was so solid that he said the SEC, ACC and Big 12 would shortly see their collective folly in trying to play in a pandemic when much had to be learned about COVID-19.

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I wish there was the equivalent of an air quality index meter for this sort of thing. Or maybe something like an antigen test. But there is no plausible marker to measure what's happening. So in the absence of a quantifier, I'm going to give it at least an identifier.

The Foghorn Leghorn Seattle Sports Week: A Set of the Most Unheard of Things I've Ever Heard Of.

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For those wondering how the smart people at all the Power 5 universities could look at similar data and come to different conclusions regarding whether to attack or retreat from COVID-19, Huskies rookie head football coach Jimmy Lake has an opinion on that.

"I believe all three other conferences are going to follow suit (canceling) in due time,” Lake said Friday on a Zoom conference with reporters. He believes the information upon which the Pac-12 and Big Ten conferences acted in canceling football and other fall sports for 2020 will become apparent to the SEC, ACC and Big 12.

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Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh grabbed a figurative broom Monday morning and began sweeping out the tide. He released a statement pleading for the 2020 college football season to happen.

"I'm not advocating for football this fall because of my passion or our players' desire to play but because of the facts accumulated over the last eight weeks since our players returned to campus on June 13," he wrote. He went on to cite the fact that the Wolverines athletic department has had no positives among the latest 353 players, coaches and staffers tested.

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Guess we'll see who's boss now -- the universities or the football teams.

In a letter to students Thursday, University of Washington president Ana Mari Cauce wrote that more than 90 percent of classes will be online this fall. The decision was not a surprise, and it follows a similar decision July 23 announced by Washington State.

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The NCAA's worst nightmare is becoming a reality: An organized revolt by football players at big-time schools to end the long-established collective exploitation of  athletes.

The argument could be made that the revolt couldn't have been more poorly timed, when a pandemic threatens to wipe out a season of the cash cow of football. The response: The NCAA has had 114 years to reform itself, encouraged by many inside and outside to do so. It whiffed.

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The Pac-12 Conference produced Friday its best shot at a 2020 football schedule, virtually daring the coronavirus to do its worst. So far in the U.S., it has done that very well.

Unless some drastic changes occur in federal leadership and public behavior, it won't be played. But, like a miracle, maybe COVID-19 will disappear.

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Jen Cohen is about as earnest, enthusiastic and successful an athletics director as there is in the ruthless world of big-time college sports. As a Tacoma kid, she grew up enthralled by University of Washington sports. Since her 2016 appointment to succeed Scott Woodward as athletics director, she's been in her dream job.

So as you can imagine, the last seven months for her have been an unyielding nightmare.

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The thresher of the coronavirus continues to make hay of optimistic sports schedules. The Pac-12 Conference Friday followed the Big Ten Conference's lead and made the football schedules conference-only, meaning that Washington's September games against Sacramento State and Utah State joined Michigan on the discard pile.

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The coronavirus, always in the lead, is beginning to put distance between its relentless self and the local and national sports sensibilities.

The highlight event of the Seattle sports calendar in September, the visit of the Michigan Wolverines and coach Jim Harbaugh to Husky Stadium for a season-opening game Sept. 5 against Washington, was cancelled Thursday.

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Those darn college kids. Don't they know their near-constant desires to get drunk and laid are in the way of the entire purpose of universities, which is to stage college football?

Life is full of hard decisions, kids. You can't always get what you want, wrote Mick Jagger wrote a couple of generations ago. But if you try sometimes, you get what you need.

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This month the NCAA is distributing about $225 million to member schools. Cool -- until it is realized that the expected payout was $600 million. The difference is due largely to the cancellation of the men's basketball tournament because of the coronavirus and all the clean protocol in the stadium, you can click here for read the new protocols.

Now you know why the University of Washington athletics department gave itself a 15 percent haircut Friday.

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Now we know what new Huskies football coach Jimmy Lake thought about the quarterback crew he inherited from Chris Petersen:

Help!

Kevin Thomson, a lightly recruited QB in 2014 -- yes, 2014 -- from Auburn Riverside High School who became the Big Sky Conference offensive player of the year at Sacramento State, is transferring as a graduate and will be immediately eligible at Washington, his third school in seven years.

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