To beat San Diego State on homecoming, WSU will have to improve in big ways on offense
PULLMAN – Jimmy Rogers barely hesitated. He was sitting at a table in the Cougar Football Complex, the same one he sat at a few days prior after his Washington State team’s narrow season-opening win, and he pondered how to help his Cougars turn in a better effort against their next opponent.
“For us,” Rogers said, “it’s always gonna be more so about how do we improve on the errors we had inside of a game and focus on ourselves right now.”
If it seemed like coach-speak, it shouldn’t. Rogers and the Cougs face a home matchup with San Diego State on Saturday, set for 7:15 p.m on KSKN, a tough test on an early edition of homecoming. But if WSU wants to take down San Diego State, a veteran team coming off a much more promising season-opener, it’ll have to play much better than it did last weekend.
So as the Cougs prepare to host the Aztecs, a matchup of future Pac-12 foes, they’re walking a fine line: They want to clean up the mistakes that nearly cost them last week’s game, the penalties and running issues and missed assignments up front. But they’re also trying to wrangle SDSU, which has a new quarterback in Michigan transfer Jayden Denegal, who is protected by an experienced offensive line.
While the Cougars could well exceed expectations and win some of the tougher games on their schedule, if their season-opener becomes an omen and the Cougs struggle in the ways they’re expected to, they face a little pressure to win on Saturday to extend their bowl streak.
There are other factors to consider too. Could new Pac-12 members like SDSU position themselves at the rebuilt conference’s forefront with wins over holdovers? With a loss, what kind of scrutiny – right or wrong – could Rogers face for his decision to name Jaxon Potter starting quarterback? Last week, he showed he’s willing to pull the plug when he subbed in redshirt freshman Julian Dugger for two series. If things go south this weekend, could Rogers switch things up at that position again?
The Cougs will cross those bridges if they get to them. What they can do is fix the blunders that kept their win over Idaho so close. That starts up front, where their offensive line – left tackle Ashton Tripp, left guard Johnny Lester, center Brock Dieu, right guard AJ Vaipulu and right tackle Christian Hilborn – played an outsized role in their offense producing just three rushing yards.
That came on 22 carries, which were spread around to running backs Angel Johnson (10) and Kirby Vorhees (6), Potter (2) and Dugger (4), one of which came when he had to backpedal and fall on a bad snap from Dieu. Maybe WSU’s ballcarriers could have found more holes to hit, but for the most part, they were stacked up by Idaho linebackers who often faced little resistance up front.
“Well, I think the running backs run to where you know their read starts, and when you can’t get to your read because the line of scrimmage is getting penetrated, it makes it harder,” Rogers said. “Yeah, there are some opportunities that we maybe could have made somebody miss, but at the same time, we got to make sure that we’re giving at least opportunity to see the read before the penetrations, making them cut against the grain or go in the direction in which the play is not supposed to go.
“Some of it is coaching, and that’s on me, and there’s no question about that. Certain scenarios, I don’t know if we put our best players in the best situation, and I’ll take full accountability for that, but we need to grow.”
This weekend, it doesn’t get any easier on offense for the Cougars, who will face an Aztec defense coming off a 42-0 shutout of FCS Stony Brook. In that one, SDSU held Stony Brook to just 95 yards of total offense, including just 46 through the air. Star edge rusher Trey White picked up five QB pressures, and the attention paid to him opened things up for fellow edge rushers August Salvati (two sacks) and Jared Badie (one sack).
SDSU also doesn’t miss many chances to bring opponents down. In their season-opener, the Aztecs whiffed on just three tackles, and one came from a linebacker who doesn’t appear on this week’s SDSU two-deep. In head coach Sean Lewis’ second season, the Aztecs may have been picked to finish eighth in the Mountain West, but they’ve blossomed into a technically-sound defensive unit.
Could that spell trouble for a WSU offense still finding its way, trying to integrate several new starters? The Cougars are also expected to be without wide receiver Devin Ellison, who is slated to miss his second straight game with what Rogers called a heel contusion. At the very least, they can’t afford seven penalties, the number they were called for last weekend.
On the other side of the ball, WSU’s defense is fresh off an encouraging showing, forcing a pair of turnovers against Idaho. Things also get a little more challenging on this end for the Cougs, whose defensive line will be facing an Aztec offensive line that has a combined 139 games, including 99 starts. One name to watch: right guard Bayo Kannike, who last week logged a Pro Football Focus pass-blocking grade of 88.8, tied for fifth-best nationally among qualified offensive linemen.
That puts the spotlight on WSU’s defense, which missed 22 tackles last weekend, per PFF, though that number is a tad misleading because defenders did well to swarm opposing ballcarriers. The Cougs also couldn’t sack Vandal quarterback Joshua Wood, but they did generate 16 pressures, signaling they had few issues wreaking havoc – they just couldn’t get all the way home.
The good news for that group is that Denegal is not nearly as mobile, fashioning himself more of a pocket-passer. Plus, if the Cougars’ offense turns things around, their defense might not have to be perfect. But it will be anything but easy against this SDSU defense.