At least they weren’t Nebraska
PULLMAN — It’s straight out of the Coaching 101 playbook to talk about the negatives after wins and the positives after losses in an attempt to balance a team’s psyche throughout a season.
On Sunday, Washington State head coach Bill Doba found an interesting way to reconcile his team’s 41-38 loss to Oregon 24 hours earlier, a game that included a blown 14-point fourth-quarter lead.
“It’s tough to lose. But you could be Nebraska — 70-10, holy mackerel. I feel bad for that guy,” Doba said of first-year Cornhusker coach Bill Callahan, whose team got crushed by Texas Tech. “We didn’t have a very good day, but I think Oregon had a great day.”
Doba did address some of the problems from Saturday’s game, most of which came from the defensive side of the football. The Cougars gave up 646 yards to the Ducks, and couldn’t find the formula to slow down the Oregon offense despite sacking Kellen Clemens five times and recovering three fumbles.
Before Saturday, the Cougar defense had been the strength on a team that was struggling to put points on the board. As a result, that role reversal against Oregon made for even more head-scratching.
“Defensively I thought we got a little bit soft,” Doba said. “We were ahead by 14, and we got a little conservative in the secondary, keeping everyone in front of you and trying not to give up the big pass. And they started catching those little out cuts and moving the ball down the field on us. They had 102 plays, which is way too many, obviously. I think the guys kind of panicked. They wanted to make plays and were trying to make big plays.”
The Cougar secondary was the most obvious culprit based on the stat sheet alone, as Clemens completed 36-of-55 throws for 437 yards and three scores. The five sacks would seem to reinforce that notion as well.
But WSU blitzed Clemens on a number of his throws, and also gave up more than 200 rushing yards. So Doba said that while the secondary didn’t have a banner day, throwing blame at its feet was a mistake.
“It was a combination of things,” Doba said. “It was a little bit up front. The linebackers missed a few tackles and missed a guy in coverage. The secondary was soft and we had a couple of assignment blows. It was total — you can’t pin it on any one group.”
Doba said he didn’t think the scheme was faulty, a notion that makes sense when one considers WSU’s heavy reliance on a 4-3 look against a number of offensive formations. That concept is central to the Cougar defense, and so it’s not as if Doba and the defensive staff installed a new, exotic look that didn’t work.
And Doba also said he didn’t think Oregon had created a blueprint for attacking the WSU scheme. Rather, he said the “speed bump” that was Saturday’s defensive effort came down to execution.
“It wasn’t a lack of effort. Our guys, they were flying around,” he said. “We don’t run the same blitzes every week anyway. We’re always changing them up a little bit. Ours aren’t anything really that special. There are other teams running field blitzes and zone blitzes exactly the way we do.”
Looking forward, the head coach said he still feels his team is in good position, provided the Cougars continue to improve along the way. The next test is in six days, another home game against a Stanford team that is vastly better that it was in 2003.
“They’re all going to be tough,” Doba said. “But by gosh, we’ll get it going again.”
Over the Hill
Cougar wideout Jason Hill caught two first-half touchdown passes by burning Oregon cornerback Marques Binns on fly patterns. But then the WSU sophomore didn’t catch a single pass the rest of the day, something that Doba said probably shouldn’t have happened.
“He was open a couple times, and we threw it to guys who were a little more open,” Doba said. “They got up and bumped a little bit. Hindsight is 20-20, and we probably should have thrown it deep to him again. But we had a lead, I think they were trying to run the short passing game and control the game a little more. There’s a lot of things we’d do differently.”
On the year, Hill now has eight touchdowns on 17 receptions. He has at least one touchdown in four consecutive games, failing to reach the end zone only in the season’s first game at New Mexico.
Injury update
The Cougars escaped Oregon without any major injuries to report.
But WSU is still on the medical watch as a handful of starters continue to work their way back to the field.
Tight end Troy Bienemann is still doubtful for the Stanford game with a bruised fibula, and is having more X-rays taken this week to double-check for any stress fracture.
Wide receiver Marty Martin is almost certain to miss another game with a sprained shoulder.
And defensive tackle Ropati Pitoitua, coming back from a high ankle sprain sustained on Sept. 11 against Colorado, is questionable.