Wulff says Eagles ‘underachieved’
With plenty of time to cool off, Paul Wulff was hotter Monday morning than he was Saturday night after watching his Eastern Washington football team’s inexplicable 21-14 loss to Central Washington.
“We underachieved,” he said. “Our kids played like we were just going to show up and win. That was about as bad of football as I’ve ever seen here … just a true embarrassing performance. A lack of maturity and lack of leadership showed up.”
Wulff didn’t go into details about what inadequacies his 0-3 team revealed on the game film but his plans for this week were revealing.
“We practice extremely hard,” he said. “We open up some positions to see who’s going to take it, prove that they’re going to make plays in the game … because obviously we’re missing kids that are going to make plays in the ball game.
“We’ve got to do that. We still have not gotten a sack from our defensive line and we haven’t run the ball for 100 yards with a running back yet.”
More damning was Wulff’s assessment of Central, which makes the Wildcats’ win even more impressive.
“I guess if we lost to a team that played a great game that’s one thing, but I’m not sure Central played a great game,” he said. “Give them credit. But they tried to give us the game, they turned the ball over four times, they tried to let us beat them by four touchdowns and we still couldn’t even do that.”
To make it worse, Saturday’s crowd of 7,943 was the largest ever for a home opener and fourth largest ever at Woodward Field.
The Eagles came out of back-to-back losses against superior I-A talent without real serious injuries, which Wulff credited to scaling back on contact a little bit in practice.
But the Eagles had more injuries against Central and Wulff is taking off the gloves.
“That’s the way it goes,” he said. “The strong are going to survive. We’re going to go with who can play and not going to worry about anything. They’re going to work their butts off and we’ll play with who we got.”
Injury report
All-league safety Bryan Jarrett was the biggest casualty, suffering a high ankle sprain, making him doubtful for the Big Sky Conference opener at Montana State on Saturday.
“I don’t even want to think about it,” Wulff said. “It’s pretty disappointing because our safties are getting depleted. We thought we had a lot of those guys.”
Gregor Smith missed the Central game because of a groin injury suffered against West Virginia.
Defensive tackle Lance Witherspoon and backup safety Robert Pearson suffered concussions when they collided on punt coverage – the play on which CWU sophomore Brandon Kennedy set up the winning touchdown with a 44-yard return to the Eastern 3.
Left tackle Rocky Hanni played with a strained neck and was unable to finish the game.
Position battles
Wulff only addressed two specific position battless, quarterback and kicker.
With junior Chris Peerboom still questionable because of a concussion, redshirt freshman Matt Nichols remains the starting quarterback by default.
Kicker is another matter. The Eagles have settled on Brett Bergstrom over two-year veteran Sheldon Weddle. Both are seniors.
“It’s consistency and leg strength,” Wulff said. “He’s proven it in practice and with the opportunities in games he’s done it.”
That didn’t make it any easier to break the news to Weddle on Monday.
“It’s hard. We’re all just people,” Wulff said. “It’s tough when a kid has worked hard, done a lot of good things. But this is college football and there is going to be a starter and a backup. We have to do what’s best for the team.”