WSU recap
High point of the game
Jason Hill didn’t have a big game against USC on Saturday, but he did catch a short touchdown pass from Alex Brink near the end of the second quarter to make the score 14-12. Although WSU squandered some of the momentum from the score by unsuccessfully attempting a two-point conversion, Hill’s touchdown made it obvious to both teams and to a sold-out Martin Stadium that the Cougars were going to be capable of playing with the Trojans.
Low point of the game
After holding the USC offense to 14 points in the first two-and-a-half quarters of play, the Washington State defense hit a wall in the third quarter, and didn’t change things until it was too late. On a third-quarter drive the Trojans went 99 ½ yards on nine plays, and then after getting the ball back they went 83 yards on 17 plays. Together, the drives took more than 13 ½ minutes off the clock and added a decisive 14 points to USC’s total.
A pat on the back
The Cougar offensive staff assembled a near-flawless game plan to match up against the USC defense, and if the players on the field had done a slightly better job at executing things might have turned out differently. Although a couple of play calls were somewhat questionable — when isn’t that the case over the course of a game — for the most part the Cougars had a coherent, well-designed scheme that did a nice job of exploiting Trojan weaknesses.
Needs fixing
USC exposed a major weakness in the middle of the WSU defense, and just about every opponent from here on out is sure to continue probing that part of the field until the Cougars do something to change things. The Trojans figured out that receivers running across the field — or just sitting in the middle of it — would have no problem beating Cougar linebackers, and even a switch from Greg Trent to Scott Davis didn’t help slow down USC’s Steve Smith. Not every team will have a wideout as talented as Smith, but all of them should be willing to see if theirs are good enough to do as well against WSU.
Three unanswered questions
1) Will this narrow loss be a springboard to better things or an offering of false hope for WSU?
2)Will other Pac-10 quarterbacks victimize the WSU defense as John David Booty did?
3) Is Dwight Tardy becoming the Cougars’ go-to running back?
Glenn Kasses