Analysis: WSU won’t face another offense like Washington’s this season. But the Cougars have problems on defense

PULLMAN – Zoom in far enough from Washington State’s 59-24 loss to Washington, which never needed to punt in a runaway win Saturday night, and you can see the nuance.

The Cougars were down one starting defensive tackle due to injury. Their other exited early with his own injury. They were facing the Huskies’ frenetic offense, one of the finest in the nation, which will no doubt give top-ranked Ohio State problems next week. WSU may not have forced a punt, but through three quarters in Saturday’s game, the hosts trailed by only one score.

“For the most part,” WSU coach Jimmy Rogers said, “I thought we hung with them.”

The Cougars did just that. They made the right choice in starting Zevi Eckhaus at quarterback. They produced two sacks on UW quarterback Demond Williams Jr. They may have been overmatched on defense, but they needed to play some of their best football to give themselves a chance to pull this upset. They checked that box.

The details on WSU’s last two outings on defense, both of which resulted in allowing 59 points to the opponent, are kinder to the Cougs. Against North Texas, their offense couldn’t stop turning the ball over long enough to give their defense a fair shake. Against Washington, WSU faced two of the best playmakers in the country, the caliber of whom the Cougars won’t see again this season.

Those are all encouraging signs for WSU’s defense, which is somehow not as bad as its last two showings might suggest. The Cougs will get some respite next weekend against Colorado State, a plenty capable team but not at the level of UW. They find ways to show promise, even in defeats like these.

But no defense that permits back-to-back point totals of 59 points is blameless. For WSU, there was plenty of fault to go around in this loss, these two topics above all: Why do the Cougars struggle so much against dual-threat quarterbacks? And why is their tackling such an issue under a head coach who prioritizes defense in such a strong sense?

In four games, WSU has languished twice against mobile quarterbacks: Idaho’s Joshua Wood and UW’s Demond Williams Jr. Let’s be clear: These quarterbacks are not the same. Wood managed only 33 passing yards against WSU. Williams generated 298. One is a great signal-caller at the FCS level. The other is one of the best in all of college football.

But both gave the Cougars problems with their legs. Wood piled up 101 rushing yards. Williams posted 88. Against both, WSU looked wobbly, struggling to contain both the run and the pass.

Asked directly about the reason for this, linebacker Parker McKenna kept things succinct.

“Honestly, I’d probably just say tackling,” said McKenna, whose team lost defensive tackle Bryson Lamb to an injury during warmups and fellow starter Max Baloun to his own injury later in the game.

Some of that is to be expected against a quarterback like Williams, whose speed and mobility make him a tough cover. It’s certainly to be expected against a running back like Coleman, who forced 10 missed tackles last week alone. On Saturday, he racked up 59 yards and two touchdowns on 12 carries, pairing his strength and low center of gravity to bounce off tackles like an elastic ball.

WSU won’t face another tandem like those again this fall. But the Cougars have now looked unsteady against playmakers of two distinct calibers.

This is worth acknowledging: Washington State showed signs of improvement, even in another rout. The Cougs recorded seven tackles for loss, including sacks by McKenna and defensive ends Isaac Terrell and Buddha Peleti. Their pass rush remains a strength of their unit.

But even against offenses like Colorado State’s, which features a pocket-passing quarterback, the tackling WSU put on display against Washington won’t fly.

“We just couldn’t make the most of the situation where we had the opportunity to make the play,” Rogers said. “We had him kinda wrapped up. We let him out of our grasp up front. He rips the ball in there and gets the first down.

“Other ones, we thought we had a beat on run-pass, and they run the ball and they split us up the middle, and he gets a huge gain. We need to get back to the basics of just doing the basics better. And it’s not always about trying to protect all the players all the time and the scheme and the coverage. We gotta be able to execute just the basic fundamentals of wrapping up and making plays. And tonight, we failed at that.”

That trend is affecting WSU’s ability to get off the field on third down, which is in turn affecting its ability to win games. Across their last two games, the Cougs have allowed conversions on 13 of their last 15 third-down chances. All told, North Texas went 4 for 8. UW went 8 for 9.

In those situations, WSU can’t string together the plays it needs to. On too many occasions against the Huskies, the Cougs surged into the backfield for tackles for loss – like on Malaki Ta’ase’s 5-yard tackle for loss on Williams in the fourth frame – only to turn around and yield a bigger play. UW followed that loss with a touchdown pass, going to Denzel Boston, who hauled it in over Kenny Worthy III.

For WSU, the question that surfaced three weeks ago has returned: How many of the problems the Cougars experienced in this loss are a product of circumstance, like squaring off with some of the country’s best playmakers, and how many are more fundamental, like an inability to get ballcarriers to the ground when they have the chance? After a loss like this, it’s fair to expect the former. But if the issue is the latter, it may not matter who WSU starts at quarterback this fall.