Eastern’s eighth straight winning season fails to live up to expectations
“An interesting year,” Eastern Washington football coach Beau Baldwin called it a few moments after the 2015 season ended in a 34-31 loss to Portland State on Saturday night at Roos Field.
It played out much like the Eagles season, with flashes of brilliance offset by inconsistency on both sides of the ball. A high-scoring offense sputtered near the end, while the defense came up big in several games before getting worn down in November.
“We saw some things that were good, but we also saw some things we have to look harder at in January, February and March with what we were doing,” Baldwin said.
When it was over, the Eagles had notched their eighth straight winning season under Baldwin, but their final record of 6-5 pales in comparison to the 35-9 record and a trio of Big Sky Conference titles earned over the previous three years.
The good news: Eastern will have plenty of time to regroup; for only the second time in seven years, the Eagles are done before Thanksgiving, the product of a three-game slide to end the season.
Call it the burden of expectation, one which seemed to ride heavier on a team that was making big transitions at quarterback and on its entire defense.
“You try to guard against that feeling that we’re entitled, that we’re going to win because that’s what we do,” Baldwin said. “But sometimes it’s even hard to respond each year after having won, after being told how you’re going to do it again.”
“At times this year, we weren’t able to handle it as well as we should,” Baldwin said.
The biggest head-scratcher for some fans was the decline of the offense, especially in November. After putting up video-game numbers in the first six games, Eastern stagnated down the stretch. The culprits were many: lack of speed in the backfield (in eight conference games, the longest gain by an EWU running back was 21 yards), injuries on the offensive line, and quarterback Jordan West’s decreasing confidence in the face of defenses that seemed to make him hesitate in his post-snap reads.
After five games, West was the top-rated passer in FCS, but in his last three games, he was 39 of 82 for 484 yards and just one touchdown. In retrospect, one of the biggest blows was backup Reilly Hennessey’s ankle injury suffered in the second game, at Northern Iowa. By the time he healed, it was late October. When the crisis hit in November, Hennessey was being pressed into service after a two-month hiatus.
Statistically, the Eagles finished eighth in the nation in total offense with 478.5 yards a game and first in passing offense (353 yards), but averaged just 3.85 yards a carry and turned the ball over 24 times. Most frustrating of all was the declining success on third down: In November losses to Northern Arizona, Montana and PSU, the Eagles were just 14 of 39 (35.8 percent).
Defensively, the Eagles expected some growing pains with a big infusion of youth (in some games nine starters were underclassmen) and a new 4-2-5 scheme under new coordinator Jeff Schmedding. To their credit, they persevered through September, ending the month by rescuing a sputtering offense with a shutout second half in a 28-20 win in the conference opener at Sacramento State.
“We’re putting together good quarters, and now good halves,” Schmedding said at the time.
Their finest hour came in the wind and rain on Halloween Day against Weber State. Bending but not breaking, they forced the Wildcats to settle for three late field-goal attempts. All missed, and Eastern escaped with a 14-13 win.
There would be no heroics in November as the Eagles faced a trio of rivals with postseason aspirations of their own. Confoundingly, they couldn’t get off the field on third down, allowing opponents to convert 34 out of 50 chances, or 68 percent.
By the end of the year, Eastern ranked last among 123 FCS teams in first downs given up, with 297, or 27 a game.
“Just little mistakes here and there,” safety Zach Bruce said. “It’s stuff that we’ll be able to go back, look at, and make corrections.”