John Blanchette: WSU defense finds effective new gear by picking up the pace

PULLMAN – Fevaea’i Ahmu thudded his 292 pounds into an overmatched chair and sighed.

“It’s a thin line between love and hate,” offered Washington State’s junior defensive tackle. “I love this game and I hate it.”

Can he get an amen from the Cougar congregation?

He didn’t mean this game specifically – the Cougars’ 23-20 loss to Arizona State on Saturday – but he may as well have, it being both the most loveable and hateable 60 minutes Wazzu has teased and tormented its fan base with this slip-sliding-away football season.

In fact, he could well have been giving voice to what countless Cougar fans seem to be thinking – that they love the Cougs, but hate this team.

On Saturday, the team gave them a reason to rethink that notion.

But not the best reason. Not a victory.

No, they hated that.

It leaves the Cougars 0-3 in Pacific-10 Conference play with a vague hint of 2005 in the air, when not everything went wrong but only at the wrong times. And even if the Greek chorus that dogs the Cougs from laptops and barstools and call-in shows turns down the burners just a little this week, it hardly matters.

“We need to win games,” said Ahmu. “It doesn’t matter what anybody says or what critics say. We know time is running out. We have seven more games. And we need to win as many as we can.”

This may sound pointless to those who have already written off the season, but perhaps that’s just the slightest bit premature.

Indeed, Stanford – Stanford! – beat USC on Saturday night in the Coliseum, meaning that Earth now officially orbits around the moon, which has been confirmed to be constituted of green cheese, previous denials to the contrary.

If that can happen, who’s to say that the Cougs can’t salvage some dignity out of disaster?

Providing the offense gets it in gear.

Now there’s a twist on Cougar reality for you.

That Wazzu spent more than 41 minutes leading or tied with the unbeaten, 18th-ranked Sun Devils was not exclusively, but primarily, due to a beaten-down – two starters missing – WSU defense that has taken nothing but hard licks from BCS opponents on Saturdays and harder licks from the Cougar public the other six days.

But things were different from the first snap against ASU.

First, the Sun Devils missed on a deep out pattern that cornerback Devin Giles, well, covered adequately while linebacker Andy Mattingly applied the first of what seemed like 100 blitzes. Then Ropati Pitoitua crushed ASU’s Ryan Torain for a 3-yard loss, and Matt Mullennix broke through to sack Rudy Carpenter – and for the first time all season, the Cougs had forced an opponent to punt it away on its opening possession.

By day’s end, the Devils would be the winners despite managing just 296 yards of offense, with Carpenter being intercepted twice and sacked seven times.

Naturally, it did not escape notice that the Cougars did this by almost always running a linebacker and often three at Carpenter, and relying on their maligned young secondary to play considerable man-to-man.

“We thought that maybe the secondary had matured enough to put (this) pressure on them,” said WSU safeties coach Leon Burtnett. “We just let them have fun – shake and bake it. That’s what we’d done all spring and we probably should have been doing a little more of it throughout the year, but we just didn’t know if our kids could handle it.”

Well, they did. Not without incident, but without the scars of previous weeks. They allowed just 16 points – one ASU touchdown being a 69-yard interception return – and as Burtnett pointed out, “When you do that, everybody did good.”

Of course, a blitzing, aggressive attack is what every defender wants to play – “It takes everything out of the thinking process,” Burtnett said. It also begs the question why the Cougs didn’t try it earlier – and if they’ll keep after it.

“It depends on who you’re playing,” insisted head coach Bill Doba. “If they’ve got a quarterback that can run like crazy, you don’t want to lock up those corners on somebody when they’re going to have some time (to throw). Carpenter is a guy who stays in the pocket. We’ll make that decision week by week.”

But even if they don’t make it a permanent scheme, there’s part of it that needs to be – the part in which the Cougars play with passion and not passivity.

“That’s the difference between the last four games and this game,” Ahmu said. “We were really getting after it.”

Some of that may have stemmed from a players-only meeting the defense called last Sunday where they challenged one another and asked, “Who are we playing for?” Maybe it stemmed from a feeling, voiced by defensive end Lance Broadus, that “we were letting the offense down.”

Really? For all the hoohah over the quarterback records being rewritten by Alex Brink and Wazzu’s supposed firepower, the Cougars have averaged all of 18 points in three Pac-10 games. The defense, until Saturday, had been decidedly unspecial, but this has been a shared swoon, in every sense.

“They have to unite and become a team and trust each other,” noted Burnett.

Now there’s a notion to love. Even if they hate that it took another defeat to drive it home.