27 4th-quarter points stun Coug defense

PULLMAN — If the clock had run out after Oregon racked up 99 plays and 635 yards of offense, Washington State still would have escaped with a victory. It didn’t, and the 100th play — plus 13 more yards — turned a sure-fire WSU win into a crushing defeat in the home opener of the Pac-10 season.

On that 100th play, Ducks quarterback Kellen Clemens scampered 13 yards on a designed draw into the end zone, giving Oregon its first lead and its first win of the Pac-10 season, a 41-38 stunner over the Cougars (3-2, 1-1 Pac-10) before 35,117 in Martin Stadium.

“I was scared how open it was; I panicked,” Clemens said of the game-winning run, his third rushing touchdown to go along with three more passing scores. “It was like there’s nobody here. You’re worried about tripping or something.”

That final Oregon touchdown capped off a 27-point fourth quarter in which the Ducks (2-3, 1-1) dismantled a WSU defense that had yielded just 664 yards in the previous three games combined. On Saturday, Oregon finished with 646, the fifth-worst defensive performance in Cougars history.

It was also the most yardage allowed by WSU since Arizona State had 651 in 1989, head coach Bill Doba’s first year as a Cougars assistant.

Even after the final touchdown, the WSU offense had a chance to repeat late-game heroics that had saved wins at New Mexico and Arizona. But the Cougars failed to pick up a first down, dropping two passes and watching two more fall incomplete as the Ducks finished off the comeback win.

Twice in the fourth quarter WSU had a two-touchdown lead, but the previously stingy defense had no answer for Clemens and wasted what was perhaps the team’s best offensive outing of the year.

“I thought 38 points would be enough for us to win any game,” Doba said. “I just thought we were going to get that thing — we had a minute and 20 seconds or whatever it was — we’d take the ball back down the field and at least get a field goal and go into overtime. But it didn’t happen.”

While the offense spoke of its disappointment about not evening the score in the game’s final minute, the Cougars defense was significantly more upset about its lackluster day.

“We weren’t challenging them at all, and that was kind of frustrating,” said safety Hamza Abdullah, who led the Cougars with 14 tackles in part because the defense was allowing so many long gains. “They were starting way back in their area of the field and they just marched down the field. We just didn’t show up.

“They had a great offensive strategy. They knew when we were coming and where we were coming from, and they’d go away from it every time for a big gain. My hat goes off to their offensive coordinator because he did a great job.”

Oregon didn’t have to spread to ball around on offense because two receivers, Demetrius Williams and tight end Tim Day, had room to roam. Williams caught 12 passes for 126 yards and Day pulled in eight — all in the second half — for 152 yards and two touchdowns. Terrence Whitehead also ran for 166 yards and caught seven passes for 71 more.

The Cougars defense was by far the greatest strength from the team’s 3-1 start, while the offense had struggled to put points on the board. On Saturday, those roles were reversed from the start. WSU got the ball 1:32 into the game and went over the top of the Oregon defense for a 39-yard Jason Hill touchdown on its first play. Two possessions later, it was more of the same — Swogger to Hill for 25 yards and another score. But Swogger also threw two interceptions, and Oregon controlled the ball for 38:55, making continuity difficult.

“We’re just up and down, and that’s unfortunate. You can’t control football games that way, and in the end we didn’t control it because of that,” offensive coordinator Mike Levenseller said. “We’re just inconsistent right now, which is what you find a lot of times with young teams. You find an inconsistency, the inability to do it time after time and rep after rep. And that’s kind of where we’re at right now.”

The Cougars have the luxury of another home game next week against Stanford to try and iron out those inconsistencies. Because of the loss they need a win to keep up with the Pac-10 front-runners.

They also need to reconcile just how the Ducks managed to escape with a win when the Cougars had the game seemingly in hand, an act that WSU had been pulling on opponents in 2004, not the other way around.

“We got the lead, and then, bang, they come right back down the field on us and we just didn’t make plays,” Doba said. “We had a chance to put it away and we didn’t.”