A postgame post from Seattle
COUGARS
Really, that wasn't all that hard to explain. "What happened today is they outplayed us today," said linebacker Sekope Kaufusi. "Records don't matter, as you could clearly see tonight. Whoever comes out that day and plays the best, wins. Bottom line is, Oregon State made more plays than we did." Read on.
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• Simple, isn't it? But the record that does matter is the one the Cougars sport this morning. They are 3-4 overall, 1-3 in the Pac-12. To get to a bowl game, they will have to win at least three games against Oregon, California, Arizona State, Utah or Washington. And, in case you haven't been watching, in order, one is ranked in the top 10, one won big today, one will win the South Division and the other two are, at the very least, WSU's equal. Thanks to Saturday's loss, WSU is up against it. ... And they stand there once again without Jeff Tuel. The junior showed flashes again Saturday, when he had time. But he got battered, beaten and knocked out, suffering a left shoulder injury of some sort and may be lost again. He'll be examined more Sunday. ... Back to what Kaufusi said. The sophomore, who led WSU with nine tackles, said OSU "had a little chip on their shoulder from what we did to them last year." A little? When Sean Mannion threw his first touchdown pass on the Beavers' first possession, the OSU bench erupted like the Cardinals dugout after another Albert Pujols home run. "It looked like everybody came to play," OSU coach Mike Riley said and he was right. "I do think we hit and played hard, and kept hitting and playing hard." And that's why they won. ... I want to get into a couple things before I call it a night, but one of them isn't Paul Wulff's future. That's not for me to decide. No matter how it comes down when the season's over, I won't be surprised. But what did surprise me was a couple of personal foul calls on the Cougars' Casey Locker and Kaufusi. Not that the penalties were called, those are judgment calls. But that they were called dead-ball fouls. They both came within the flow of making a tackle. I don't get it. ... I also didn't get the time to tweet as much as I would like in the second half. It's fun, but when you have to put together a story to file at the end of the game along with the play-by-play for a scoring summary, there isn't much time to tweet. Sorry, but I'm just not good enough to pull all that off. ... Here's my game story,
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• That's it for tonight. We'll be back, like always, in the morning. Until then ...
