Today I think its important that we all take a step back and look at our current coaches behavior and how it is being perceived outside our crimson bubble of unquestioned Mike Leach worship and adulation. The consensus? Not necessarily in favor of our new coach:

Dave Boling

Stewart Mandel

Vince Grippi

Bud Withers

John Blanchette

Jim Moore

Look, I don’t like Marques Wilson walking out on his teammates, and I am not advocating a return to Paul Wulff, so lets just put that aside. I am, however, very concerned that our coach is going out of his way to make Ed Cunningham look like a genius. That doesn’t mean I don’t support the team, or I have a loser mentality, it just means that I am actually paying attention. The current situation this team finds itself in, suffering embarrassing losses, having physical confrontations in the locker room, and star players quitting the team, may just be the necessary growing pain we have to endure to achieve eventual success. We’re just ripping off the bandaid, as it were. But there are very legitimate concerns about our coaches ability to deal with the current  failures in a way that does not compound them and make things worse.

From the public shaming of specific players, to the antagonistic confrontations with a press that is not even close to hostile (yet), our coach is making an ass of himself and our fanbase is mostly cheering him on. More and more I am starting to realize that when some people refer to our coach as “TSO”, it isn’t necessarily a term of endearment.

Hello Followers.  Hope your election week is off to a good start.

Well, with the news that Marquess Wilson has quit the WSU Football team, all hell seems to have broken loose in and around Cougar Nation.

In fact, judging just by both my Facebook Page as well as my inbox, Cougar Nation seems divided evenly onto either side of Rusty's (pictured above) klassic kiester.

So, in an effort to call a spade a spade, I put together two and a half thoughts.  For more on that, read on.

Happy Sunday Cougs.  We'll skip the formalities after yesterday's steamroller loss in Salt Lake, as the Cougs barely got off the plane in their 49-6 disaster of a game.  And let's just get right down to it, shall we?

It's funny, the hope that can exist as a sports fan and all that comes with it.  A week ago at this time, after watching the Cougs came awfully close to putting a road game at a ranked opponent into overtime, you would have thought we WON or something.  There was a lot of "the Cougs might go 3-1 to close the year" and "we can still get to a bowl if we win out", talk like that.  And to be honest, from where we all sat a week ago, it seemed like some good things were coming and that somehow, this team had finally figured some things out.  Even Mike Leach said it was the most complete game they had played, the most complete four quarters of football they had played in 2012, even with the EWU and UNLV wins in the bank.  And when you looked at the stat sheet after the game, it was hard to argue against that statement.  The Cougs outgained Stanford (the only opponent WSU has actually outgained this year btw), and if you were to erase the pick-6 that Stanford had vs. Jeff Tuel in the third quarter, we might have not only gone to OT, but we might have seen the Cougs driving for the winning field goal in the waning moments!  

But then, last weekend's game was left in the rear-view.  All the talk from the last week that you heard from the team was that they were 1) tired of losing, and 2) done with moral victories.  As Sutra pointed out yesterday, in picking the Cougs to win by a healthy margin, was that it was the "Day to Win".  There was some decent improvement going back a couple of weeks ago as well if you wanted to go that far, to the Cal game where it wasn't as bad as it seemed especially from the QB position.  But then you saw the overall improvement in the Stanford game and many thought "Why not?"  In our Football Friday post, Longball and myself picked the Cougs to lose but by a very close margin, and Lucas even picked the Cougs to win by a field goal.  It sure didn't seem like a stretch just a day or so ago, did it?

But yet, here we are.  They barely got of the plane in an embarrassing, bottom-of-the-pit effort that was flat from basically the second drive of the game onward.  It felt all too familiar, like the BYU game from earlier this year where the first drive they move the ball, sputter, and then the wheels just come off?  But this was a game that was simply an epic collapse on both sides of the ball, from a poor job on the lines on offense AND defense, to poor tackling and mistakes in coverage throughout the rest of the defense, to an offense that was tentative and out of sync the entire day.

But what to do now?  You know what's weird, but the Cougs have been in this exact place just one year ago, believe it or not.  Anyone remember the Cal loss last year, on November 5th of 2011?  It was coming off a road game in Eugene, where the Cougs "only" lost 43-28 at Autzen.  On that day vs. the Quack, the Cougs actually OUTGAINED the Ducks on offense(!), and aside from some big special teams mistakes where Oregon blocked a punt for a TD and returned a kickoff for a TD, there was talk of  "turning the corner" and "we can play with ANYONE!" and all that.  The following week the Cougs headed to the Bay Area to take on a Cal team that was talented, sure, but just not very good, with just one conference win at that time.  This would be the week, many of us thought, that we would finally turn the corner and get that big win!

But then Cal came out and kicked our collective asses back to Pullman in a 30-7 loss, in which Cal effortlessly strolled to a 30-0 lead into the third quarter.  The offense was out of synch and couldn't block anyone, the defense tackled poorly with very little effort, and it was just an awful loss.  Cal would outgain WSU 411-224 on the day, and it was where many marked the end of the Paul Wulff era in Pullman with screams of "Fire Wulff!" all over twitter.  It was clear to many at that point that Wulff had lost this team, and there was much anger that they could just sleepwalk into a game like this, a game many around here were convinced we would win after playing so much better at a ranked opponent the week before, only to see them come out with, shall I say, a corpse-like quality??

So what exactly is my point to all this??

Hello Followers.  Hope your weekend is off to a great start.

Today, our Cougs travel down to SLC to play the talented, but nonetheless not-so-mighty Utes. 
For a few pre-game thoughts and predictions, click on the old Jumpa-Vegas.

So now that everyone is sick on halloween candy and has a yard full of smashed jack-o-lanterns we can finally get round to this week’s game, a crucial matchup with Utah. With the number 6 now staring at us in our loss column, it is officially Defcon 1 for our bowl hopes. If that isn’t enough to get you fired up for this game, how about the revenge factor against a Ute team that ended our bowl hopes last year while lacerating our QBs liver? Fired up now? Me too! We had a promising showing last week on the Farm, but the days of moral victories need to be over. It’s time to finally get over the hump and go on a... win streak. Some of us don’t remember what that means, and some of us don’t believe such a thing exists. Will Jeff Tuel and company prove these people wrong starting this Saturday? Your blogfathers have their thoughts as well as other picks around the league after the jump...

This week Amieable and I are thrilled to welcome Cougar nation back to the Wasatch Front for our tilt with the Utes of Utah. For those of you making the trek to Salt Lake City, here is a handy guide to help make your stay more enjoyable. We can’t wait to see Coug fans crawling all over the SLC, and we are especially excited to hear the shouts of “GO” answered by “Cougs!” ringing out across Temple Square. Besides being a chance to avenge Connor Halladay’s liver, this game is also the first leg of what promises to be an improbable miracle run to a bowl eligible finish. How are we going to do it? Click the jump to find out...

Hello Followers.  Hope you’re having a great weekend.

Well, as I head into the last hour before a state of emergency becomes official where I live (they are telling everyone to NOT go outside from 4:00pm this PM until further notice), I thought I’d hit you with a few Monday thoughts.

So, if you’d like to check out why I’m leading with a CAL-Washington type headline on a Cougar blog, then read on.

Hello Followers.   Hope you’ve had a great week.

As for me, well, it appears that a hurricane is heading straight toward my neck of the woods.

So, instead of sitting down this morning to write my Friday post, I headed out doors to try to get the house ready for the impending storm….And as I raked and bagged a dump truck worth of leaves, I found myself wondering if our Cougars were getting similarly ready for Saturday.

For more on that, read on.

So my picks got lost in the shuffle and didn't appear in this morning's post. My fault, but I don't have time to re-hash my picks, so real quick, I like Stanford, Oregon, Oregon State, USC, ASU and Cal. But that's not why I am here this afternoon.

It's not too often I find myself in the same circles as Stanford grads. Other than having watched The Social Network, loving Tiger Woods, and having gone to high school with a chick who did Gymnastics at Stanford before she was on The Bachelor, I know nothing about them.

So when I got an email earlier this week from my favorite Cardinal fan, Hank Waddles, I had a grin from ear to ear. For the third year in a row, Hank, from Go Mighty Card, has reached out to me so the two of us can get the scoop on the unanswered questions we have about our respective teams. I'd link to the last two years worth of posts so you can see how thorough and awesome Hank's past analysis has been, but I'm still learning how to effectively navigate the Archives in our new look and feel

Aside from #88 costing me a pick in my Weekly Office Pool when the Cards were laying 6 for their visit in Seattle last month, I haven't caught a ton of their action. From what I can tell, their QB is awful, their WRs are non-existent, but boy, they can run and they can play defense. Sounds a lot like my Seahawks.

Anyways, without further ado, Hank has some answers for my five burning questions about the Trees and our game!

This week we mourn the loss of the greatest (creepiest?) voyeuristic experience Coug fans have ever had as Mike Leach has banned twitter. No longer will we be able to know everything every player is thinking and doing at any moment of the day. It seems that despite a seminar on the risks of social media, some players demonstrated the extraordinary thickness of their heads by continuing to tweet things that were offensive and irresponsible. For some of us older folks it can be hard to wrap our heads around the absence of caution young people use on social media. I used to employ up to 60 college students at a time in a previous job, and let me tell you, we were constantly flabbergasted by their complete inability to understand the risks associated with social media. One of my favorite examples was a student who called in sick, then proceeded to update us via twitter about all the fun he was having at the lake with his friends. Another student invented an elaborate excuse for a series of absences that involved a sick newborn niece who eventually died. Via the wonders of Facebook, where she had “friended" me we were able to see quite clearly that her “newborn niece” was actually a toddler, living in another state, just starting preschool and very much alive. Incidents like these were not exceptional, they were the rule. We tried to explain these things to our students in as plain of terms as possible, but it went straight over their heads. They literally have no functional concept of privacy. This experience alone makes me want to applaud the decision coach Leach made this week. However, I am not sure what it will accomplish since it is easy for players to just send similar messages via facebook, or other social media outlets. You also have to wonder, will this inevitably lead to loss of players as somebody decides to test the rule? Will this affect recruiting (gawd, I hate having to ask that, but its true.)? I guess we’ll see.

One thing is for sure, we here at the WSU Football Blog are unaffected by this new rule and will continue to bring you the best predictions the internet has to offer. Our picks for this week after the jump...