Cougars miss the points with decision to take field goal off board

PULLMAN – The Cougars made their second-half comeback, the score was tied, and with just more than 6 minutes to play the game was starting all over again.

Well, not quite. Shucking conventional wisdom, head coach Bill Doba and his offensive staff decided to take points off the board, passing on a successful 25-yard Loren Langley field goal to take an offside penalty on Jamar Williams, who had jumped forward from his spot on the right side of the Arizona State line.

The penalty moved the ball half the distance to the end zone, 4 yards forward but still one shy of the first-down marker. No matter, Doba figured, as Washington State had run the ball successfully and had a pitch to Jerome Harrison that was good as gold.

“I took points off the board,” Doba said. “I had confidence in our offense. It looked like we had just a yard; I was told it was a yard.

“I just wanted to win with these guys and give them a chance to win. I thought a tie, if they go down and kick a field goal late …”

The fans watching in Martin Stadium know what happened next. Harrison took the pitch right, heading to the short side of the field, and got stuffed by two Sun Devils defenders behind the line of scrimmage.

The points that were, weren’t, and Arizona State escaped with its 27-24 win.

“Coach Doba apologized after the game for taking points off the board,” said tight end Troy Bienemann, a senior captain.

“It’s something you never want to do. It’s like they knew we were going to run outside to the right. They had a couple guys over there that we couldn’t block. It didn’t look too pretty pre-snap. We tried to get a half a yard and couldn’t do it.”

Multiple Cougars, like Bienemann, said they saw the play was in trouble. But quarterback Alex Brink, the one player who could have changed the play at the line of scrimmage, wasn’t one of them.

“I think it was a good play call,” Brink said. “The play is designed so if it’s overloaded we should still be able to run it. The play call really didn’t affect (it); it was the execution.”

Harrison declined to comment on the play’s specifics, but said he had no problem with the call and criticized himself for failing to pick up the needed yard.

But others agreed with Bienemann that the Arizona State defense gave Harrison little chance for success on the play.

“They knew what was coming,” center Nick Mihlhauser said. “It was one for them. They stuffed us. … We had to check it or at least call time out.”

Most of the offensive players had huddled around Doba near the sideline after the field goal while the head coach made the decision to accept the penalty. And nearly all of them said they were hoping to go back onto the field for fourth down.

Doba said he didn’t want to risk having the game tied and giving Arizona State a short field – the wind was gusting at its back – but with so much time left in the game and a defense that was playing well at the time, it’s a decision that will be questioned often.

And with the Cougars now out of the bowl hunt, they’ll have plenty of time to wonder what would have happened if Doba and his staff had gone with the safer option.

“It’s a game of inches, isn’t it?” offensive coordinator Mike Levenseller said.

“We took a shot with it, and we’d rather do that than sit there and second guess. Obviously, we’ll look at it and see what went wrong tomorrow. Tonight it just hurts.”