WSU needs to play game with urgency

PULLMAN – A day after last week’s loss to Oregon State, Washington State University head football coach Bill Doba was asked about the bowl picture for his team.

The question sounded odd. After all, the Cougars have only lost one game, and they still have seven games left to win three and qualify for postseason play.

But Doba and the Cougars, as funny as it sounds, might be well served to take the field today with a degree of urgency before playing their second Pacific-10 Conference game of the year.

Because in 1-2 Stanford – a team coming off of losses to UC Davis and Oregon – WSU might well be looking at the last team it will be favored against until the Apple Cup. After today, it’s nothing but ranked opponents until the last week of the season.

A loss today after handing a win away last week would put Doba’s team far, far behind the 8-ball.

Sound familiar? It should. Just last season, the Cougars lost an early conference game they should have won to an Oregon team – the Ducks, not the Beavers – and had a home game against Stanford.

In a game that still has people in Pullman shaking their heads, the Cardinal beat up WSU, took an early lead and never gave it away. That loss put WSU in a hole, and, as it turned out, helped put the Cougars on couches in December.

“I don’t want to make any negative parallels. We get enough as it is,” Doba said, reinforcing that this would be just another week, just another game for his team. “We’ll stay the course. We played pretty well (at Oregon State). We just didn’t make plays when we had to and we made a few mistakes.”

So at 2 p.m. today, in yet another untelevised game this season, the Cougars will have to prove that the 2005 edition won’t crack like the 2004 version did at precisely this time of year. WSU still hasn’t won an October game since 2003, going 0-4 last year plus the loss last week.

But fortunately for WSU, this doesn’t appear to be the same Stanford team that managed a road win in Martin Stadium last year. The Cardinal are laboring as their record would suggest and significant personnel changes are possible today, according to first-year head coach Walt Harris.

But in the Cougars’ minds, those recent struggles are yet another reason to fear a misstep. Doba has spent much of the week touting every Stanford strength he can find, from special teams to smarts. Now, the Cougars boss just has to hope the message has come through to his own team – before this season starts to bear more similarities to the one they’re trying to bury.

“They’re not a bunch of 195-pound weaklings,” Doba said. “Kids today, they know what the heck’s going on. They’re in there looking at videotape, at all their games. They can see there’s talent there.”