Jacob Thorpe: Why this bye week comes with greater importance for WSU football

Welcome to a bye week, the only type of weekend this football season where you can be fairly certain how it will go for Washington State.

For teams, these Saturdays often provide a chance to do a lot while doing little. Rest and recuperation are paramount, of course. Young players get a few more snaps during practice. Perhaps an opportunity to install some new plays or test someone at a new position.

For the rest of us, we are left to reflect on the season as it has developed and what might lay ahead for the Cougars.

There are three games remaining. Not just in this season, but in this era of WSU football. This haphazard wandering through the schedules of teams willing to take on an additional game, this exile imposed by WSU’s former Pac-12 counterparts. These two years in the desert come to a close, and the era of the newly built conference will begin.

Have these years been successful for the Cougars? Has this season? Is success even possible when your schedule is wholly unique in the sport, when Oregon State is your only recurring measuring stick, or are the Cougars simply passing the time until the games have meaning again?

Count me among those who say the Cougars are in a good spot, and there is a lot to look forward to. In Jimmy Rogers, the team has a young head coach who is showing an ability to maximize his team’s potential and seems ready to stick around Pullman for awhile to build a winning program. His team plays hard, it plays good defense, and punches first against more talented opponents. It has given people a reason to keep watching during a tumultuous period in which it would have been easy for many fans to turn off the TV.

If the past two years have made one thing abundantly clear, it is that WSU, as an institution, does not control its own fate. Regardless of the moves and missteps of its administrators, there was never an option for the school to stay in a power conference. There are likely to be fewer players drafted to the NFL straight from WSU. Many of the talented young players are going to go play for better NIL money somewhere else.

This is the kind of thing Rogers would probably call excuse-making and make his players run laps for whispering. But hey, I’m not a player. So let me make some excuses.

Without the privilege of choice, success for the Cougars is going to mean being better at playing an inferior hand. For the athletic department, it’s going to mean being creative in both scheduling and marketing. For the coaches, it is going to mean being better at finding players and better at scheming ways to beat opponents. It means creating an identity as one of those programs that continually outperforms its circumstances much like Boise State has done in football, or Gonzaga in basketball.

Are they set up to do so? Rogers taking his team on the road and nearly winning at Ole Miss and Virginia is an encouraging sign. Losing to a faltering Oregon State is less so, particularly since more than any other program OSU’s future success is likely to come directly at the expense of WSU’s, and vice-versa.

Both programs deserve credit for attracting prestigious enough programs that starting next year the Pac-12 should be one of the most highly-respected mid-major conferences. The northwest schools were kicked off college football’s highest mountain, but they’ve landed OK.

And by doing so, the Cougars were able to backdoor their way into a place where their measure of success may look a little different, but the dreams can remain the same. When WSU played in a power conference, it had a small chance of making the major bowl games or, eventually, the College Football Playoff. But it had a chance. Those Mike Price teams made Rose Bowls, and Mike Leach may have gotten the Cougars to the playoffs if the high points of his tenure hadn’t coincided with Chris Petersen’s best teams at Washington.

With an expanded playoff and a respectable mid-major conference, the Cougars perhaps have an even better shot to make the playoff during their best season. After all that wandering over the last two years, the path is clear.

And for this final season in exile? Beat the Beavers in the rematch. Make a bowl game. Head into 2026 as one of the top dogs in the Pac-12.

You kept the fans interested. Let them dream of playoffs once again.