Blanchette: Cougars have turned corner without looking back

PULLMAN – The toothy smiles that occasionally broke through late Saturday afternoon were accompanied by sincere hand-wringing, perhaps the best sign of all that success hasn’t spoiled the Washington State Cougars.

Yes, that was actually the Concern of the Week – being too giddy over the previous Saturday’s conquest of an unranked team in silly uniforms.

Strange, yes, but could this really be the new normal of Cougar football?

Maybe not quite yet. The old normal –the Cougars’ split personality – continues to hang tough, for example:

Good Cougs: laid waste to the Oregon State Beavers from kickoff all the way to Mike Leach’s crusty halftime exposition for the broadcast audience, Wazzu’s latest fun football tradition.

Bad Cougs: All sorts of second-half antics that allowed the Beavs to make the final score a pseudo-respectable 52-31 instead of the 100-3 crushing that seemed destined.

So as the Cougars paraded in front of the press, there were the obligatory nods to the need to “finish” better – the new No. 1 among the Football Bromide Top 40. True as it was, the united front did not prevent a dissenting thought:

If you finish off a team in 30 minutes, it’s still a finish, no?

This will not find it’s way into Leach’s sermon to his team this week or any other. But the fact is his Cougars were so crisp, efficient and dominating – and ahead by four touchdowns – in one half that the Beavers had no earthly hope of fighting back.

It was so over that a good chunk of the announced sellout crowd of 32,952 never made it back from their favorite beer gardens for the second half.

Oh, wait. That happens every game – ahead, behind, sunny 70s or wind-chill 20s.

If the Bailout Bunch is to be cut any slack this time, it’s because they’d seen as good as they could possibly see.

Even linebacker Peyton Pelluer allowed how jazzed he was about “being able to give them a game we’ve been wanting to give them for a long time.”

Coming off a humiliation at the hands of Arizona and the Pac-12’s worst at disciplines like scoring, passing, defending the run and pressuring the quarterback, the Beavers were not anybody’s idea of tough out. Indeed, they may be no better than Wyoming, but the impression is that the Cougars made them look that bad.

But how good the Beavers are is hardly the point.

Nor, really, is how far Oregon – the Cougars’ victim a week earlier – has or hasn’t fallen. Sure, the Ducks were missing their mail-order quarterback and were stuck with what they, you know, had evaluated and recruited by more traditional means. But they’ve been everyone’s measuring stick for a good spell in this conference, and it took the likes of Michigan State and Utah to take them down before the Cougs did. That doesn’t put Wazzu in that company, necessarily – but they don’t have to apologize for it, either.

Apologies would have been in order if they’d futzed and flailed around against OSU – the sort of thing that has happened before.

They didn’t.

Luke Falk was as measured and precise as any of his more accomplished predecessors, throwing a school-record-tying six touchdowns before intermission – more TDs than incompletions, perhaps. At one point, he completed 18 straight passes – and not all of the dink-and-dunk variety, and his quarterback rating midway through the second quarter was 221.3.

“He was on fire,” OSU coach Gary Andersen said. “We helped him at times be on fire, but hey, that’s football.”

The Beavers had worked on tricking it up all week – adding a fourth rusher to their normal three-man front, and sometimes coming with max blitzes. It worked hardly at all.

“We just paid attention to where there’s space and where there’s grass,” Falk said of his attention to open area.

But there were also slashing runs – Gerard Wicks and Keith Harrington both averaged more than 8 yards a carry – and a defense led by Pelluer and crushmeister Shalom Luani that was making life miserable the Beavers’ freshman apprentice, Seth Collins.

The Cougars did so much right in those first two quarters it’s pointless to detail it.

Problem is, it also suggests the wasted opportunities of the season’s first month.

Joe Dahl took stock of the 4-2 record as a midsemester report card, even as the Cougars approach things week to week.

“I’d be more happy if it was 6-0,” the senior tackle said. “Everybody knows that was definitely in the realm of possibility. We try not to look back, but there’s a handful of plays that set it apart.”

But that’s old-normal stuff – the what-ifs. If success isn’t going to spoil the Cougs, there’s no sense letting past failures do it.