DOOBIOUS DECISION NOT HIGH POINT

The beat goes on for Team Spliff.

Washington State's athletic department drew its line in the sand with
the Pullman police Wednesday, and at the same time muddied its own
code of conduct.

DeAngelo Casto, peeping-tommed by cops who alleged he was rolling a
doob in his apartment in the wee hours Tuesday morning, quite properly
lawyered up and contested the charge on Wednesday - and then, not so
properly, was summarily unsuspended and started the Cougars' NIT
quarterfinal win over Northwestern that night.

Now the Cougars board a plane to New York for the JV tournament's
semis. On the plus side, they won't have to go through customs when
they land.

Or they could drive. Is Ken Kesey's old "Further" bus
available?

In the traveling party will be three players - Casto, Klay Thompson
and Reggie Moore - who have been cited within the last three months
for some form of possession of marijuana, in police actions ranging
from routine to dubious to "Are you kidding me, Mr. Junior G-man?"
That's 60 percent of the starting lineup for you stat geeks.

No wonder the Cougars are such a good passing team. If you don't
bogart off the court, the theory must go, you won't bogart on it.

And now they even pass on their established standards.

From the school's official statement Tuesday: Casto was "suspended
indefinitely for a violation of team rules" by coach Ken Bone, who
was quoted as being "disappointed in DeAngelo as he let himself and
his teammates down."

Then, on Wednesday, a miracle! No violation!

In clearing Casto to play, athletic director Bill Moos, again in a
school-issued statement, referenced "new information" and "unique
circumstances."

He didn't specify the new and unique stuff, but it's pretty obvious:
the bust was a Buford T. Justice job. A screen missing from Casto's
window in an area hit by recent burglaries was Deputy Peepers' idea of
probable cause to espy the, uh, smoking gun. Casto was asked to give
up his goody bag and complied. No search warrant was issued or served.

You know what they say about safe sex - no glove, no love? Be warned,
Wazzu students: no drapes, no dope.

Moos explained Wednesday that "the team rule we thought (Casto)
violated, he contested. I think he's got some meat to that. I like to
get out in front of these things and probably in retrospect we should
have let it play out."

Hold on. The legalities notwithstanding, the police report said what
Casto handed over was marijuana and not pocket lint. Still sounds like
a violation of a team rule. Or is it a team rule only if the arrest is
by the numbers?

According to Moos' statement, "The appropriate avenue to take is to
allow the legal system to run its course."

Hmm. Let's jump to a pertinent passage from WSU's Student-Athlete Handbook:

"In the case of behavioral problems which involve formal criminal
charges by a law enforcement agency, the involved student-athlete will
be placed on suspension by the Department of Athletics until the facts
of the incident are reviewed."

So, in effect, Cougar athletics has no code of conduct - or an elastic
one.

"I don't like to take a firm stand on a bowl of Jell-O," Moos said. "I
would say because of the information we got today, it puts the whole
thing in a different perspective."

The perspective here is that reinstating Casto was as situationally
sketchy as the bust. But let's move on to two bigger questions that
Moos squared up to address:

Does Cougar athletics, or at least the basketball team, have a drug
problem?

"There's a drug problem on this campus," he said. "I know the
president is concerned about it."

Regarding his own playpen, Moos was blunt: "I'm not sure we have a
championship mentality here. We have to instill in our
student-athletes a mentality that Saturday's game is more important
than tonight's party. We're in a location that has a lot of positives,
but Pullman is also extremely visible and our young people need to be
aware of that."

He also admitted, "We have to get our disciplinary act
together."

Are Wazzu athletes being targeted by the Pullman
police?

"I have a concern about that," Moos said. "College Hill is not the
collegial, fun, exciting place I remember as a student-athlete, or
even working here 25 years ago. It's become, in my observation, in the
minds of the authorities in Pullman the 'bad part of town.' I don't
think that's serving anyone very well."

The sorts of piddly arrests and citations that make the news in
Pullman would be pour-out-your-beer and flush-your-stash warnings in
larger cities. But this might be just the sort of enforcement previous
WSU administrations sought to tame a campus culture - and it may still
be what full-time residents prefer. Might be time for some public
forums on that issue.

Oddly enough, Moos met with Pullman police chief Gary Jenkins Tuesday
- - arranged long ago - to discuss the dynamic. The Casto affair is
likely to be the wedge needed to keep that exchange going.

"But we still need to address the drug issue in this department," Moos
said. "In a perfect world, if the Pullman police or campus police
wanted to target our athletes, there would be nothing to target."