‘It just seems broken to me’: Curley says finances killed rivalries as WSU marching band sits out of Apple Cup

Washington State University’s (WSU) marching band will not perform at this week’s Apple Cup at Husky Stadium, and the dispute over why has become a symbol of the broader tension threatening to end one of college football’s oldest rivalries.

WSU said the band was offered nosebleed seating that made it logistically difficult to get to the field for a halftime performance, an Apple Cup tradition. The University of Washington (UW) said the seats are the same ones given to every visiting band since 2024, but WSU declined to attend.

KIRO host John Curley said on “The John Curley Show” on KIRO Newsradio that the band’s absence is a small version of the larger problem: money is winning, and tradition is losing.

“They look at it like, ‘Look, it’s not worth it to us to play our rival with all the years that we’ve been doing the Apple Cup,'” Curley said. “There’s no money in it for us.”

UW football reported $127.8 million in revenue for the 2023-24 fiscal year, representing 68% of the athletic department’s total $187.5 million. The Apple Cup contract runs through 2028, but UW does not want to sacrifice home ticketing revenue by playing every other year in Pullman, and WSU would demand games at Martin Stadium on a rotating basis.

Curley argued that the donors and alumni who fund the programs want the rivalry to continue.

“You would think that the supporters of it, the donors that give all the money, that they want to see that,” Curley said. “They want the Apple Cup. And they’d be willing to say, ‘Okay, we’re not going to make as much, but this is the tradition that we play the Cougs.’ My god, isn’t there something to be said about just the tradition of the thing?”

Curley, producer said college football is ‘broken’

KIRO producer Paul Holden said the marching band dispute is part of a wider shift in college athletics where money has overtaken everything that made college sports distinct from the pros.

“It’s really interesting where college football and college athletics in general are at right now, where it is tradition versus it doesn’t make just financial and fiscal sense,” Holden said. “It made sense when college football was truly sports and college. But now in the NIL era, it’s a business. It’s big business.”

Curley traced the shift to the name, image, and likeness era, saying players now have no loyalty to a program and can easily leave the school for a better deal elsewhere.

“College football has basically turned into minor league NFL,” Curley said. “You have no loyalty to the team, and then do the fans have the loyalty to the players? I don’t know. It just seems broken to me at this point.”

Holden said the marching band is one of the last pieces of the college experience that still feels authentic, and losing it at the Apple Cup matters more than the seating dispute suggests.

“The marching band is a huge part of the experience,” Holden said. “It’s one of those things that is essential to college sports, where it’s Saturday, it’s fall, you’re back on campus, and you’re walking in, and you hear your fight song.”

“That’d be sad. The band doesn’t show up, and the band’s cool,” Curley responded.

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

Listen to “The John Curley Show” weekdays from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio 97.3 FM.

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