NCAA football

After shuffling out one program and replacing it with not one but two new members, the Big Sky Conference’s schedules for the 2026-27 season required significant overhauls.

Utah to Las Vegas as wobbly Arizona approaches the tipping point.

Luke Falk has always been the kind of athlete who prioritized having a mental edge.

PULLMAN – Washington State may be battling a bevy of injuries on defense, but the team is set to get one key player back this weekend.

PULLMAN – Here is a first look at Washington State’s road game against Oregon State on Saturday.

MOSCOW, Idaho – If resurrection is too strong a word, it doesn’t miss by much.

PULLMAN – As far as jobs on a football field go, offensive line ranks among the most thankless. When a quarterback has time to throw, he’s praised for making the right reads. When he doesn’t, the blame immediately goes to the offensive line, the mistakes the group is making, the ways it could be overmatched.

PULLMAN – From the very beginning, from the moment Jimmy Rogers posed for pictures with the No. 35 Washington State jersey a few days after he became the Cougars’ next head coach last winter, he established a vision for the type of football descending on the Palouse.

PULLMAN – Parker McKenna doesn’t say much. Not after practices, not in radio shows, especially not after Washington State games, not even when he makes plays that almost singularly turn the tide in favor of the Cougars.

PULLMAN — In his second and final season at Washington State, Parker McKenna has blossomed into one of the team’s hardest hitters. At the linebacker spot, he’s delivered a slew of vicious tackles, punishing opponents with crunches over the middle.

Parker McKenna

Washington State built a comfortable lead with a second-quarter onslaught, then its offense went quiet for most of the second half. But the Cougars’ defense kept Toledo at bay and WSU snapped a two-game losing streak, cruising to a 28-7 victory over the Rockets on Saturday at Gesa Field in Pullman. Now back at .500, the Cougs (4-4) have a couple of winnable games ahead of them – they face one-win Oregon State next weekend at Beaverton, Oregon, then host a middling Louisiana Tech team on Nov. 15.

With starting quarterback Joshua Wood returning from a knee injury that slowed him in the second half in a loss against Montana and kept him out of the next two games, also losses, everything changed for the Idaho Vandals, who had last won a game Sept. 14, against Utah Tech.

In other circumstances, the performance by Eastern Washington’s offense on Saturday would be lamented more than remembered.

For the past week, Jedd Fisch and his defensive coordinator, Ryan Walters, emphasized the importance of forcing turnovers. They beseeched the UW defense to steal a possession and play complimentary football.

PULLMAN – Talk to anyone in the Washington State football orbit, fans to former players to casual observers from afar, and this sentiment has seemed to hover over the program recently.

PULLMAN – Here is what to watch for when Washington State takes on Toledo at 12:30 p.m. Saturday on The CW.

Washington (5-2, 2-2 Big Ten) vs. No. 23 Illinois (5-2, 2-2)

At 2-5, without a Big Sky Conference win in three tries, Idaho clings to hopes of making the Football Championship Subdivision playoffs for the fourth straight year. Now, though, every game is fraught with peril. The Vandals need to win their final five games, including picking up victories against Northern Arizona (ranked 20th in the Stats Perform poll and 22nd in the AFCA poll) in an ESPN2 game on Halloween and the University of California Davis (ranked sixth in both polls) Nov. 8.