WSU finishes Thursday workout
COUGARS
Quite a light afternoon for Washington State, as Paul Wulff's press conference was delayed and practice was all about fine-tuning the game plan for Saturday. Read on.
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• There is never any hitting on a Thursday, with the practice all about making sure the players have their assignments down. In that way today's practice was fairly typical. What wasn't typical, however, this week was the number of players who missed time with an intestinal virus. That seems to have worked it way out the door, though, as just about everybody, and every starter, who missed time back and at practice. The challenge of having so many players miss time this week was something we asked Wulff about in his presser. We'll relay his complete answer in our story in Saturday's paper, but suffice to say he said it has thrown a bit of wrench into the works this week. ... As for UNLV's defense, Wulff was asked if he expected it to do anything different with Marshall Lobbestael at quarterback, as in maybe stacking the box and forcing the Cougars to throw. It's so early in the season, Wulff said, you have to almost expect anything. The Rebels might try that, he said, but they might have tried that if Jeff Tuel was playing. ... As for the temperature, Wulff said the Cougars have been hydrating all week, will continue through the game and be ready for anything. Last season, when WSU went to Dallas to play SMU in the heat and humidity, the training staff did such a good job the Mustangs had more troubles with cramping and the like than WSU did. ... The Cougars suffered an under-the-radar injury Wednesday, with freshman tight end Mansel Simmons going down with a sublexed right kneecap. If you remember, this is the injury Tuel suffered against Arizona as a freshman. Simmons was scheduled to redshirt and will for sure now. ... And that is about it, except we do have this link to our S-R story for tomorrow.
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• That's it for this Thursday. We'll be back in the morning with our links. Until then ...
