COUGARS

We've put together our follow story on Washington State's 23-22 comeback win over Montana State on Saturday, which will run in Monday's S-R. You can read it here and, if you read on, you'll find more on what coach Paul Wulff had to say on his conference call. Also, we had a slide show from the game from Chris Anderson you can access here.
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• We'll start with the injury report, in part because it is short, a rarity the past few years. Only special teams contributor Jack Wilson was injured, spraining his shoulder. However, Wulff said Bernard Wolfgramm tried to go but came out early because his shoulder was still hurting. Other than the typical aches and pains, that was it. ... He once again praised the effort on the field, saying "we just play youthful at times and just make some mistakes." ... The pressure he talked about after the game is mostly internal, and comes from the players wanting to do well. "The external stuff is there," he said, "and people's voices are there on the outside and that, I think, as much as people want to complain and think they're complaining may help the team, it probably hurts it. But for the most part it is more internal." ... The biggest problem on offense is one that's occurred before. There are 10 doing it right on most plays and one that's not. Of course, that one varies on each play. "It messes up a lot of things," he said, "and it hurts our consistency." ... With one more non-conference game remaining – this Saturday at SMU – the Cougars are still trying to find solutions to some offensive line problems, working eight players at the five positions, then evaluating the film in a quest to come up with a consistent starting five. ... Asked how much a win helps validate what the coaches are doing to the players, Wulff answered: "There isn't this coaches vs. the players or players questioning coaches. It's we're building a program and most of these kids have come in the last year or two and they are just learning college football. And they're just trying to do the right thing and executing. I just don't get, I get these kind of questions and they're just working hard to get better. They know why they came here and that's to build a program and to get better. And they play hard. They see the mistakes we make, we have to together try to fix them and clean them up and then move forward. I think a win is good when you don't play great regardless of who you play. You find all the good things we did well, build off that and keep working on correcting the mistakes we made." ... As we wrote this morning, Nico Grasu was nursing a sore oblique muscle all week, but that didn't play into Wulff's decision not to try a field goal at the end of the first half. It was more the breeze that had come up from the west, meaning any kick would have been harder. ... Wulff said he relaxed a little bit after the game with his family and friends. "When you're rebuilding a program, there's a lot days that aren't real fun," he said. "You've got to keep your eyes forward and keep grinding ahead. Right now, that's what everyone is doing." Before he was able to relax though, Wulff had to meet with a big recruit who was in town on his visit. "We're just working and moving forward," he said.

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• That's all for now. We'll be back in the morning. Until then ...

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