Cougs fail to upset
Washington State head football coach Bill Doba is right. The opening game of the season is the best time to pull a major upset.
Only Saturday it was defending Football Championship Subdivision national champion Appalachian State upsetting Michigan, not the 14-point underdog Cougars pulling it off at Wisconsin.
And maybe the upset of the century – as it was dubbed by ESPN – made it that much harder on WSU. Or maybe not.
But there was no denying the cheer that went up at Camp Randall Stadium when the Wolverine’s demise was announced reached the UW players, and there is no denying the seventh-ranked Badgers woke up right after, rallying from not one but two seven-point first-quarter deficits to win, as expected, 42-21.
Not that the Cougars, like the Mountaineers, didn’t have their chances. This was one of those days when the ball, for the most part, bounced WSU’s way.
Darryl Blunt’s punt is blocked and bounces right to him. Husain Abdullah forces a fumble on a punt, and Kendrick Dunn is able to recover it. Ken Debauche punts the ball high in the air, but only about 15 yards downfield, then it bounces back toward the Badger goal for a 1-yard net – before Debauche bats it forward for a 15-yard penalty. P.J. Hill is hit by Chima Nwachukwu near the goal line and the ball is on the ground.
Only the Cougars didn’t cover the last one, Hill scores on the next play to make it 35-21 and, as Brink put it, “all of a sudden we’re getting the ball back down 14 to the No. 7 team in the nation and it’s the fourth quarter.”
Doba, looking back at the opportunities, summed it up succinctly: “They tried to help us but we just didn’t take advantage of it often enough.”
And therein lies the rub. This team needs to learn to take advantage if it wants to reach its goals. A USC, a Wisconsin, a LSU, teams of that caliber can waste opportunities and still win. This WSU team can’t, especially against teams like the Badgers.
Maybe that’s what Brink meant when he said, “We know we were as good as that team we were playing, and we could have won that game. We leave with a real bad taste in our mouth knowing that. We’re going to learn some things, but we’re not happy overall.”
Notes
The only significant WSU injury was to cornerback Chima Nwachukwu, who suffered a strained left quad. He is expected to practice this week as the Cougars prepare for Saturday’s game in Seattle against San Diego State. The Aztecs held a 106-play scrimmage Saturday to get ready for the Cougars, their season-opening opponent. At the end of last week, WSU had sold some 33,000 tickets for the game, about 4,000 more than this time last year. That game with Baylor drew 41,358.