Cougars lay egg
PULLMAN – The Cougars walked into a sold-out Martin Stadium on Saturday cloaked in a Top 25 ranking and a two-game winning streak before facing a struggling Arizona team.
It didn’t take long to discover that the heavy favorite’s new threads were really nothing at all, leaving it little protection in the driving rain.
On the third play from scrimmage, Arizona took advantage of a coverage error on a 78-yard touchdown pass from Willie Tuitama to Anthony Johnson.
And though Washington State fought back to take a brief 10-7 lead, it spent much of the afternoon finding ways to discredit all the good things that had been true about it in the previous weeks, falling 27-17, dropping to 6-4, and – as it will surely find out today – losing their place as the 25th-ranked football team in the country.
“We don’t deserve it now,” offensive lineman Sean O’Connor said. “A lot of it is our fault. We shot ourselves in the foot over and over again.”
The Cougars (6-4, 4-3 Pac-10) made mistakes in every phase of the game. On offense they failed to run the ball all game and were nowhere near as sharp as they had been of late throwing it. On defense they didn’t stop the 114th-ranked Arizona offense when it counted. And on special teams they blew a pair of punts, one a designed fake, that led directly to 10 Wildcats points, the final margin of victory.
“We better learn something from this one,” head coach Bill Doba said. “I don’t know why, we just weren’t focused.”
After the first Arizona touchdown – a mistake by the team’s safeties left middle linebacker Greg Trent in man-to-man coverage on the Wildcats wide receiver – the Cougars responded with a score on a 91-yard touchdown pass from Alex Brink to Brandon Gibson. (It was the second-longest pass play in school history.)
But 13 second-quarter points gave Arizona a 20-10 halftime lead, and the last three were a gift handed to the Wildcats (4-5, 2-4) when WSU’s Darryl Blunt couldn’t handle a bouncing punt snap and Arizona took possession on the 21-yard line with 43 seconds left in the half. Both of Nick Folk’s second-quarter field goals came after drives of 1 yard or worse, including the one he made after the punting gaffe.
The Cougars seemed ready to redeem themselves after the shoddy first half, opening the second with an impressive and speedy 77-yard touchdown drive. WSU had just two first downs in the first half. It took five plays for it to pick up three in the third quarter.
They did so without their top two receivers, Jason Hill and Michael Bumpus, who both went down with high ankle sprains in the second quarter that could keep them out for the rest of the regular season. And it seemed that the second half would be dominated by WSU, as has been the case in so many of its wins this year.
“We got a lot of momentum off of that first drive and we felt confident that we were coming back,” Brink said.
But the Cougars’ next possession was crushed by a pair of errors, the first a holding penalty and the second a failed fake punt.
Its momentum quashed, WSU watched as Arizona played an elongated game of keep-away by running Chris Henry 35 times at its battered defensive front.
“When you have as many people telling you how great you are as we have, it’s hard,” Brink said. “You’ve got to block that out and we came out flat and I don’t know why. I don’t have the answer for that. But we certainly came out flat and we can’t have that, especially against Pac-10 teams.”
The Cougars had planned on locking up a bowl bid with a seventh win, but now they find themselves with two games left and no guarantees. All week long they had spoken of avoiding a letdown, then watched as they fell into that exact trap against Arizona.
“It just didn’t seem like we were as intense,” Doba said. “I think you have to come to play every week in this league. As I told them before the game, USC found that out last week. And we found out today.”