Cliff Kirkpatrick

Oregon State TE coach Robin Ross takes any time he faces this weekend’s opponent personally.

He graduated from Washington State in 1977, played for the Cougars and coached the defensive line there in 1986.

“Any time you play there can be other things besides just another game involved,” Ross said. “It’s where you know people. You work with those people and it becomes more than a game. You want to come back and do your best. You want to go win, and don’t want to go lose.”

Ross coached there when current Washington State coach Paul Wulff and CB coach Jody Sears played for the Cougars. WR coach Mike Levenseller played on the same WSU team as Ross.

He still knows the secretary, Marie Taylor, who has worked there since he was with the program.

While he wants to win this week, Ross feels bad for his alma mater and friends with the struggles they gone through.

“You hate to see it,” Ross said. “I spent a lot of time at Washington State. I enjoyed my career there. You would like to see them win every game but one. I think they are playing hard. They have gotten better. It has been a tough season for them. Things take time.”

Injury report
Backup RB Ryan McCants (sick) was out of practice Thursday and most likely the game, coach Mike Riley said.

“We’ll see if he can go,” Riley said. “He had 102 temperature today, so my guess is he’s out. You can’t play a guy in that condition.”

Reserve LB Kevin Unga (groin) is probably out for the game.

LB Tony Wilson (knee) returned to practice this week. The redshirt freshman has been out since the end of spring practice recovering from ACL surgery. Wilson was the projected No. 2 MLB this season.

“I don’t know that he’ll get into the games this year,” Riley said. “He could help if he’s really ready to go. We’ll see. We might start by getting him in on a special team.

Sound of quiet noise
The Beavers did their usual Thursday tradition of playing crowd noise during the practice. The funny part was that it wasn’t all that loud. At one point this week there was a report that only 15,000 fans will be in Pullman for the Washington State game.

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Kevin Unga, Geoff Garner and Devin Unga came off their missions and played as true freshmen.

Oregon State football coaches have been surprised by how quick the Unga brothers got into football shape after two-year Mormon missions. Even offensive lineman Geoff Garner made a quick adjustment from his mission.

However, he had the winter and spring terms at OSU to help him get in shape with the strength and conditioning staff, dropping more than 20 pounds. The Ungas joined the team in the summer.

All three are true freshmen. Both the Ungas played some at LB and were special teams players in last weekend’s season opener. Garner got some time as a backup OT late in the game.

The last time the Ungas and Garner played in a game was fall 2005. Seniors TE Howard Croom and LB Keaton Kristick were in their recruiting class.

“We just wanted to play,” Kevin Unga said. “We’ve been dreaming about this for a long time, so we took the mentality of just going after it as hard as we could.”

Kevin Unga went on his mission in Chile and Devin went to Guatemala. They have strict schedules to follow and only have 6:30-7 a.m. to workout. They took advantage of it with simple workouts such as pushups and sit-ups, but mostly played soccer.

“They call soccer, football in Spanish, so that’s what we did,” Kevin Unga said. “The people down there wanted to know about our football, so we taught them about the game.”

Garner had a similar situation in Panama. He did sit-ups and brought a dumbbell bar to work on his arms. He played soccer on his off day for three-four hours each Monday.

What helped him was walking up to 10 miles a day because there were no means of transportation. Garner said it was hard not to just sleep that extra 30 minutes because he was so tired, and sometimes he did.

“It was great to be able to play, but I had that goal of losing weight,” Garner said. “That made a big difference. If it wasn’t for all that walking I would have been pretty far behind.”

UNLV-OSU story

Here’s a link to my Friday story in the GT. It about the relationship OSU coach Mike Riley has with UNLV coach Mike Sanford. They are tight going back to USC and and Chargers.

I joked with Sanford that he has to get into the Pac-10 with all his buddies, and he laughed saying he’s got work to do at UNLV.

He worked with Riley and defensive coordinator Mark Banker at the Chargers. RB coach Reggie Davis worked under him at UNLV and he coached him at the Chargers. Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh was the QB at the Chargers when Sanford coached with Riley. And Davis was a tight end on the team.

Road trip

Since the game is so late I’ll be traveling day of the game to Las Vegas, and not Friday as usual. I hate sitting around all day, and I don’t have extra money to blow there so I’m being good.

Follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/cliffgt to see what I go through to cover football games for the readers. I tried that last week, but that was kind of boring being at home.

Be ready for the tweets around 6 p.m. and they will be going after midnight. That’s not bad start time, sometimes I’m up at 4 a.m. to make a flight somewhere.

The blog will be up and going early, too. Please check back frequently and feel free to comment.

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