Rosetta: Differing views after LSU-Washington tilt

• By RANDY ROSETTA
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: Sep 7, 2009

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SEATTLE — Perception, reality or somewhere in between?

Apparently it depends on where you sit in an ancient press box and which team you are most familiar with.

Might also have something to do with what kind of spin you’re trying to apply after your team slogged through a performance that had to be head-scratching no matter what the circumstances.

LSU won Saturday night and started the season with something positive. That’s the bottom line.

Washington lost Saturday night and also started the season with something positive. That’s also bottom-line stuff for the Huskies.

In the Seattle Times Sunday edition, the headline for the LSU-UW game trumpeted ‘Reason for hope,’ and another on an inside column called the Huskies 31-23 loss a ‘great building block.’

Two Times columnists waxed poetic about UW’s season-opening performance, which is fair and accurate, because from their perspective the Huskies were very good.

Border-line magnificent even. Almost good enough to pull one of the biggest shockers on the opening weekend of the season.

Jerry Brewer described LSU’s closer-than-anybody-expected victory as “entertaining, sometimes thrilling.” He wrote of Washington’s explosiveness and “zest for the game.”

Although UW lost a 15th consecutive game, Brewer wrote of the buzz at Husky Stadium, and of a rekindled love affair between the Washington fans and a program that for decades was among the elite.

Another Times columnist, Steve Kelley, wrote about Washington “changing culture” and the Huskies “(cleaning) the dirty air from last season.” He wrote “For much of the game, Washington clearly outplayed the Tigers” and deemed UW a “program on the rise.”

All great stuff if you’re a fan of the Huskies.

Here’s another viewpoint: The Tigers were very fortunate to get away with a victory.