Here’s the dissenting voice for interrupting the UW-Zag Hoop series

Danny Sprinkle is known as a formidable opponent, so reports that he will be sitting out the University of Washington-Gonzaga basketball games this year and next are quite disturbing.

You don’t avoid worthy opponents, you try to beat them. You don’t quit a rivalry game that everyone wants to see.

Not only that, but has Sprinkle actually looked at the Husky non-conference schedule of the past decade or more, which outside of the annual UW-Zags meeting each winter has often produced tepid, uninteresting games?

In the past two seasons alone, the UW has played many games against the North, including Northern Illinois, Northern Arizona and Northern Kentucky.

All forgettable games. Games with empty chairs. Games that almost no one in Seattle witnessed.

Sprinkle exercised a coaching-change clause that gave him the option to withdraw from the Gonzaga series, as reported by the Spokane Spokesman-Review. It comes after the Huskies snapped a seven-game losing streak and won 78-73 at Alaska Airlines Arena last December, winning for the first and only time for now-departed coach Mike Hopkins.

Washington is of course playing its first season in the Big Ten, a league that is stronger than the former Pac-12. That may have prompted Sprinkle to tone down his team’s play outside the league.