The story disappeared as quickly as it made an appearance. On Monday 3/24, we interviewed Spokesmen Review reporter Jacob Thorpe on KTIK about the vacant Washington State basketball job. He said Boise State’s Leon Rice had been approached by school reps and said he wasn’t interested. Rice had been turning down interview requests in Boise, and we had no other sources to speak too. The social media world was dead to the idea of even speculating he would leave or that WSU was interested. We took few if any calls on the story and no other local media reports surfaced.

Until Friday.

Thorpe reported Rice interviewed Wednesday and was probably offered the job. Andy Katz of ESPN killed the story at midnight Friday saying Rice was staying. Boise State sent out a relase confirming it by 4:50pm Saturday.

Story over.

The fact that nobody here locally chased down flight reports, Leon’s exact whereabouts and reported much of anything probably reflects the lack of interest in the story. Reporters are burnt out on having done so many “Coach Pete is leaving stories.” Few, if any, local boosters actually know what is going on. And, I think, we in the media have all become increasingly concerned with social media criticism from diehard fans. After all, they can call us out to the entire twitter verse, blame us for the coach leaving and it gets ugly quick.

Oh well.

We will try to get some fan reaction to the story Monday and I will be surprised if many fans participate. The story broke on a Friday afternoon and was solved 24 hours later. A reporter in Spokane, a ESPN reporter in Connecticut and a Sports Information Director in Boise filled in the blanks. Many fans didn’t even know there WAS a story. I think it was very important and says a lot about how fans, WSU and BSU feel about Rice and his program.