Bye Week Babbling

Bye weeks are the worst, except when they’re not.

Good morning and Happy Hump Day, Cougs! Normally I hate bye weeks, but this season, I’m relieved to have a week off. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the extra three (or four) hours normally reserved for shaking my head, saying, “Damn it”, and all the other frustration that has come with the first 7 weeks of this season. Ideally I’ll play some golf, but it’s more likely that I’ll end up watching a bunch of college football and living vicariously through the fans of programs who see their teams look competent for more than a few minutes at a time. I don’t want an entire post to be a bunch of whining. We’ve all seen what’s been happening and there is no need to point out all the failings of this team for the umpteenth time, as cathartic as it may be. So, with no game to talk about this week and a steadfast refusal to re-live the past, what does that leave? Well, my friends, it leaves a bunch of semi coherent rambling. Let’s do this.

How come we have a whole bunch of different jersey combinations, but wear the same thing all the time?

Is there any surprise I’d lead off with something as arbitrary as clothes? For real, though. Why haven’t we seen the gray jerseys yet this year? There has been nary an anthracite sighting this year. This may be the dumbest conversation ever, but at least on an anecdotal level, it seems like this sort of thing matters. Even Notre Dame and Nebraska have bucked tradition this year and busted out some flashy ugly new unis. If we aren’t going to win, we can at least try to look cool. We can trick those silly high school kids into thinking we’re big time!

Speaking of recruits….

We haven’t talked about it much since a bulk of the verbal commitments Mike Leach and his staffed have received to date occurred over the summer, but the WSU recruiting class of 2013 stands at 14 commits. We’ll feature much more in depth analysis on all the commitments on This Here Blog as Signing Day approaches, but for now, here are a few notes on this class.

There are four commits from the state of Washington, none of whom has been offered by UW, according to Scout (the artist very temporarily known as Fox Sports Next). The good news is that two of the locals are offensive lineman, or at least projected to be one when they grow up. The other good news is Peyton Pelluer from Skyline. Preliminarily, the Bridgeport Pumped-O-Meter rates him pretty favorably. 

The highest rated player in the class, Tyler Bruggman, is a Quarterback. As I understand it, the quarterback position is important to the game of football because in today’s football you have to be able to throw the football to win football games. This is true in the National Football League and big time college football. I also understand that we have a head coach who values the quarterback position and seems to be somewhat dissatisfied with the players at his disposal currently.

We have received verbal commitments from three running backs because…well, I’m not sure exactly. Three commitments at running back seems a bit much for any team, but for a team that doesn’t…you know…run, it’s even stranger. But hey, they look like playmakers and when this whole Air Raid thing gets running like we think it will, “playmaker” is a more appropriate label for a position than “running back”. The more the merrier I guess.

Three commits from Texas and one from Alabama. Look out, SEC. The Cougs are coming for you.

Remember when we had that other coach and he had a propensity to point the finger at players during press conferences and we got all huffy about how he shouldn’t be doing stuff like that and then we got a new famous coach who calls out players during press conferences, but does it in really wacky ways and we’re all, “Oh coach. You’re such a silly goose.”?

I mean, what’s that all about?

Accentuate the positives

If you follow me on Twitter (@Huddlestron), you’re probably used to my pattern of saying snarky things for a long time as games are going poorly, then eventually get fed up with myself and start pointing out positives, no matter how trivial they are. I like to call this puppy dogs and ice cream mode. Since this season has gone further off the rails than any of us envisioned (don’t like; you didn’t envision 2-5), my “everything is rainbows” defense mechanism has really kicked in and I’d like to focus on the positives through the first 7 games of the gong show that is WSU Football 2012. 

WSU is 12th in the nation in passing offense! I could hardly believe this when I saw it myself since it seems like the offense has been…uhhh…bad. I’ll now stop looking at statistical rankings because we’re accentuating the positives.

Youth is being served. Let’s look at key contributors who will return next season. Decide for yourselves whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. Nolan Washington, Anthony Carpenter, RG5 (sad face), Damante Horton (the use of “key” here has become stretched, but still), Connor Halliday, Darryl Monroe, Kristoff Williams, Brett Bartolone, Deone Bucannon, Eric Oertel, Casey Locker, Leon Brooks, Teondray Caldwell, Jared Byers, Cyrus Coen, Chester Su’a, Mike Bowlin, Andrew Furney (assuming he doesn’t forego his Senior Year to be a first round draft pick), Justin Sagote, Gunnar Eklund, Jake Rodgers, John Fullington, Dominique Williams, Bobby Ratliff, Logan Mayes, Gabe Marks, Marquess Wilson, Isiah Myers, Ioane Gauta, Xavier Cooper, Destiny Vaeao and Toni Pole. That doesn’t include youngsters who are either redshirting or really only playing a role on special teams. We can argue forever about just how good these guys are and we probably will, but the new staff has plenty to work with as they incorporate their own guys over the next couple years. Yes, we’ve been waiting for next year for almost a decade now, but if there aren’t names on this list that have you at least somewhat excited, I don’t know what to tell you. Get a new hobby I guess.

Every game has been televised!

Assuming that you don’t have DirectTV, you’ve been able to watch this 7 game debacle play out in stunning high definition! Hooray! Even my positives have to be qualified at this point. This is getting dicey. Just a couple more things, then I’m outta here.

Travis Long, Ioane Guata, Darryl Monroe

I love you guys. 

There is no quarterback controversy.

If you’ve watched this season and think that Connor Halliday should start at Stanford in a week-and-a-half, you’re a crazy pants. There is plenty of time to worry about the future in the future. For now, let’s try to stop embarrassing ourselves and win some ball games. I can now say without equivocation that Jeff Tuel gives this team the best chance to do that moving forward. I feel better now.

Go Cougs.