Rested Eagles refocus
Paul Wulff is well aware that a 14-day break following the first game of the season is a luxury afforded to but a precious few college football teams.
With that in mind, Eastern Washington University’s eighth-year head coach has gone about milking every available benefit from the Eagles’ rare early-season layoff.
“It really has been nice,” Wulff said of the bye week Eastern enjoyed following its season-opening 52-13 rout of Montana-Western back on Aug. 31. “It has given us a chance to kind of clean some things up, as well as an opportunity to condition and get back into a kind of (fall training) camp mode.
“And I thought, for a bye week, our kids practiced – compared to other bye weeks – quite well.”
Since routinely dispatching of Montana-Western, an NAIA school, the Eagles have evaluated video of their season-opening win, worked on correcting the mistakes that surfaced during that game and gone back to two-a-day workouts in an effort to improve their stamina.
They have also taken an in-depth look at the University of California Davis, which travels to Woodward Field on Saturday night for a 6:05 non-conference matchup that promises to be entertaining.
“It’s always good when you can play a game and then have two weeks to fix all the mental mistakes you usually make in a first game,” said sophomore quarterback Matt Nichols, who threw for 229 yards and tied a 20-year-old school record with six touchdown passes against Western. “We’ve been working hard to clean those mistakes up, and we’ve had a couple of extra weeks to get in better condition for the next 10 weeks in a row when we have games.
“The coaches have been giving us shorter practices, but harder practices, and we’ve been running a lot more sprints and stuff that we would normally do during the season, just to get ready for these upcoming weeks.”
According to Wulff, the Eagles didn’t do much video evaluation of 1-on-1 performances against an inferior opponent like Montana-Western, instead opting to focus on themselves.
“It had very little to do with the opponent in this case,” he said. “It had to do with how we executed our assignments, our techniques and our effort.”
As it turned out, what Wulff and his staff thought they saw during their season opener was all but confirmed by the video of the game.
“Offensively, like we thought, we did some good things,” he said. “But there are definitely some things we need to do better.”
Both the offense and defense will be more severely challenged, however, by a UC Davis team that is coming off a 26-17 road win over the Big Sky’s Portland State on Saturday. The Aggies (1-1), a Football Championship Subdivision team out of the Great West Conference, feature a high-powered passing game that is complemented by the running of redshirt freshman Joe Trombetta, who is averaging 141 rushing yards per game.
Adding to the Eagles’ problems is a startling lack of depth at the free safety position, where projected starter Gregor Smith has been lost for the season because of lingering shoulder problems, and a pair of backups – Jesse Hoffman and Ethen Robinson – have been lost for the season because of injuries suffered against Montana-Western.