Eastern Washington hopes to regroup during bye week

CEDAR CITY, Utah – So much for a stress-free bye week.

Eastern Washington’s next game, against Weber State, is 12 days away, but the Eagles will get back to work this week to recapture the momentum they lost Saturday night at Southern Utah.

“We’ll get back into our team meeting and talk about some things to gather ourselves,” coach Aaron Best said after a 46-28 loss at Southern Utah.

“We will work during our bye week – that was something we were going to do anyway regardless of this outcome,” Best said.

Best and his staff also have to work on a few egos. For many young Eagles, it was their first Big Sky Conference loss. The others still can count them on one hand.

However, there is more fallout from this loss. Now Eastern is in a five-way tie for second place in the Big Sky loss column, and needs someone to knock off front-running Northern Arizona to have a chance of repeating as league champs.

Eastern (5-3, 4-1) also figures to drop out of the top 10, though upsets claimed half of that group on Saturday.

The other impact will be felt in the postseason, even if Eastern runs the table in the regular season. With three losses, the Eagles may have to play a first-round FCS game for the first time since 2009.

That’s how high the bar has been set at Eastern, which has lost just six conference games in the last six-plus seasons.

The first of those came in 2012, when the top-ranked Eagles fell to Southern Utah 30-27 on a last-second field goal. That team regrouped to win a share of the conference title and was one win from playing in the FCS title game.

This team isn’t at that level, but neither does this feel like 2015, when Eastern dropped its last three games to finish 6-5 and out of the playoffs.

With perfect hindsight, the armchair skeptics saw this one coming, a natural consequence of living on the edge in most of their recent wins.

However, Southern Utah brought its “A” game on Saturday. The Thunderbirds (5-2, 3-1) ran the ball well between the tackles and the receivers found space on short routes over the middle.

Their defense tackled well in space and their corners had the better of it against Eastern’s receivers. Two of Gage Gubrud’s three interceptions were the product of outstanding hustle.

“In the second half we just couldn’t get the oil in the engine, so to speak, on offense,” Best said. “It was a choppy game. We never matched what the defense was doing.”

On this night, SUU even had the better quarterback – when is the last that happened to Eastern in a conference game?

Time will tell if Saturday’s game was an outlier or a trend. In the meantime, there’s work ahead.

“We’ll continue to fine-tune the things we need to fine-tune, and get better,” Best said.