By Kevin Dowd

I read a lot of books in 2016 and liked the vast majority of them. As a bit of a year-end project, I decided to pick ten I thought were the best and tell you why.

So here are those ten, in alphabetical order:

“Astoria,” by Peter Stark

This is history at its finest: An incredible story from a place you’ve known your whole life that you’ve somehow never heard before. Stark’s tale chronicles the birth and death of the Astoria colony at the mouth of the Columbia River, a much-forgotten part of America’s growth during the early nineteenth century. It also taught me more about beaver trapping than I ever thought I’d know.

“Barbarian Days,” by William Finnegan

I have never surfed, and Finnegan’s memoir makes me very sad of that fact. But the Pulitzer Prize winner is about a lot more than waves. In detailing his childhood in California and Hawai’i, his travels through the world, and the way that nothing in life has ever quite equaled the feeling of falling down a wall of water, Finnegan tells a universal and beautiful story about life, aging, and the things and people we remember. Continue reading “Ten books I enjoyed reading in 2016”

The Washington Huskies will play the Alabama Crimson Tide this Saturday in the Peach Bowl. They are currently a sixteen-point underdog. Never in college football history has the point spread been so high in a game with such immediate national championship implications.

As you may have heard, the UW’s coach, Chris Petersen, has some experience with notable upsets. He was the first-year coach at Boise State when the Broncos beat Oklahoma in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl, 43-42, in what’s widely considered the greatest game of the millennium. (It’s worth noting, though, that Boise State only entered that contest as just a seven-and-a-half point dog.)

I thought it would be worthwhile (read: a good excuse to watch more football) to re-watch Boise’s classic upset and see what the Broncos did to the Sooners that the Huskies might be able to replicate against the Tide—to see if there was any sort of blueprint to discover. Here are seventeen things I learned:

1. The underdog needs a fast start Continue reading “17 Things A UW Fan Can Learn From The 2007 Fiesta Bowl”

High school basketball has returned after eight-and-a-half hoop-less months. Rejoice! The most enjoyable of all Washington’s prep sports is back.

The following thousand-or-so words are designed to prepare you— ostensibly a person who hasn’t spent large chunks of the past week googling high school kids—for the season ahead. This will focus on the western side of the state, both because that’s where the finest basketball in the state is mostly played and because that’s my area of quasi-expertise. Without further ado, let’s dive in.

About Nathan Hale…

Continue reading “Washington Prep Basketball Preview”

The game itself is cool, but it’s all the other stuff that really makes college football fun: the mascots, the fans, the uniforms, the absurdly jacked strength coaches, and, most especially, the names.

Who could forget LaDainian Tomlinson? Craphonso Thorpe? BenJarvus Green-Ellis? Alge Crumpler and Ndamukong Suh and D’Brickashaw Ferguson? They are the characters in our weekly bacchanals of violence, the collections of syllables announcers blurt out that make us say, “Wait, what’s that guy’s name?”

So without further ado, here are the best of the bunch in the Pac-12 this year.  Continue reading “The 2016 Pac-12 All-Name Team”

The WIAA announced sweeping changes to the high-school state basketball tournament earlier this week. I have some thoughts.

Continue reading “The WIAA Asks: How Complicated Can We Make A 16-Team Tournament?”

Lester, I tell you this, I’ve been all over

Carrier air conditioning in Indianapolis

against my lawyer’s wishes.

Is that OK? Good.

I don’t think General Douglas MacArthur would like that too much.

The buildings that were in question,

everything’s in great shape,

like from a third-world country.

Tremendous beyond belief.

We’ve created a movement.

You don’t know who broke in.

You want to go to Mexico or some other country, good luck.

Continue reading “The Great Anarchist HVAC Break-In of 2016; or, found poetry from the first presidential debate”

The hype machine started churning in May or June, and it hasn’t stopped yet. The Washington football team needed to win its final three games last season just to eke out a winning record; now, the Huskies are widely regarded as one of the favorites to win the conference. Sports Illustrated tabbed the UW its preseason No. 7 team in the country, and prognosticating maestro Phil Steele chose the Dawgs as the No. 8 team in the nation in his preseason issue, predicting they’ll play Ohio State in the Rose Bowl. Yes, the Rose Bowl.

It’s all rather heady stuff for anyone who’s watched the Huskies slog through the past fifteen years in metronomic mediocrity. Speckled only with a few of the worst seasons in program history for variety’s sake.

So now, with the opener against Rutgers one day away, the question: Can the UW actually win the Pac-12? I would never call myself an optimist, but in this instance at least, I’m leaning in that direction. Continue reading “Can the Huskies actually win the Pac-12?”

Here are selections for all eleven games this weekend featuring Pac-12 teams, beginning with a pair of contests Thursday night. If you use these picks for gambling purposes, I only ask for 50% of the profits. You probably shouldn’t do that though.

Southern Utah at Utah (no line)

The Thunderbirds have a brief history of hanging with FBS competition and might be able to keep this one close for three quarters. But the Utes are clearly the more talented bunch, and Kyle Whittingham-coached teams tend not to lay eggs.

The pick: Utah 37, Southern Utah 17

Oregon State at Minnesota (-7.5)

This could be an interesting one for draftniks, as Minnesota quarterback Mitch Leidner has emerged as an under-the-radar possibility to be selected in the first round of next year’s NFL draft. If it were in Corvallis, I’d like the Beavers’ chances a whole lot more.

The pick: Minnesota 36, Oregon State 24 Continue reading “Pac-12 Picks: Week 1”

One of the best parts of my time at a wonderful little newspaper called The Daily was writing these rankings every week. One of the worst parts was that I had to keep them to 550 words. A guy can only be so pithy! So I’m planning on bringing it back this year in (hopefully only slightly) elongated form. Rankings are based on who I think would win on a neutral field in a game played tomorrow. Check back next week to see how the first weekend’s worth of results impact the order.

1. Stanford

It’s still strange to see a Stanford roster studded with five-star recruits, but such is the monster that Jim Harbaugh constructed and David Shaw has continued. Quarterback Kevin Hogan graduates? Here’s All-American recruit Keller Chryst to take his place. Blake Martinez and Aziz Shittu move on from the defensive front seven? A new crop of studs are there to step in. And did we mention Christian McCaffrey? With road games against UCLA, Washington and Oregon, the schedule does the Cardinal absolutely zero favors. On paper, though, this is the conference’s most talented team. Continue reading “Pac-12 Power Rankings: Preseason Edition”

I think only three players in the conference can win the Heisman Trophy this year: Stanford’s Christian McCaffrey, Oregon’s Royce Freeman, or UCLA’s Josh Rosen. Other players could and will have fantastic seasons, but for a host of reasons, they won’t really contend for the most prestigious trophy in sports. They might not have the national name recognition to mount a real campaign. They might play a position other than quarterback, running back, or wide receiver. They might play for a team that isn’t any good. Every college football player in the country is theoretically eligible for the Heisman, but in reality the pool of players with any chance to win is relatively tiny.

But it’s no fun to just do a list of three names. So consider this a ranking of the players from the Pac-12 most likely to be Heisman finalists and qualify for a trip to New York—a much larger population than the number of athletes who could actually bring home the trophy.

1. RB Christian McCaffrey, Stanford, Junior

Most oddsmakers consider McCaffrey one of the three favorites to win the trophy (for very good reason), along with Clemson QB DeShaun Watson and LSU RB Leonard Fournette, and he figures to have every opportunity to put up jaw-dropping stats on a team that could win ten games or more. The only obvious reason to be bearish is that some voters will surely hold McCaffrey’s season up to his 2015 campaign, and matching those totals will be a difficult task with defenses even more firmly focused on slowing him down. Continue reading “New York, New York: The Pac-12’s Heisman Hopefuls”