Happy One Week To The Super Bowl Day for all of you Seahawks fans out there (which I’m going to assume is most of you). It’s been a busy week at the homestead for yours truly, which is why Craig and I didn’t get a podcast done this week, and why I didn’t get to writing about the Seattle win.

The semester ended on Tuesday, and there are few things busier for a high school teacher than the week where one semester ends and a new semester begins — wrapping up grading, integrating new students, continuing to attempt to plan engaging lessons that while doing all that … compounded by the fact that I was silly enough to volunteer our newspaper club (I’m the adviser) to work concessions for fundraising this week … compounded by the fact that I’ve never been very good at keeping up on grading. But deadlines are deadlines, and 130 essays later, I’m finally in a good spot to submit my final grades on Tuesday.

Which means I’ve got a little bit of time to write this morning! Normally I’d just skip the midweek game that I missed, but since it was an interesting win, I’ll cover it here, too.

GFC.

WEDNESDAY

#119 Seattle - 58
#147 WSU - 70

In A Minute

• WSU improves to #140 in kenpom at 10-13 overall and 5-5 in the WCC. Seattle drops to #131 at 14-9 and 3-7.

• Recap from our friend (and friend of the pod) Jamey Vinnick at Cougfan

• Official stats

• Line o’ the night: RIHARDS VAVERS with 24 points on 10 shots (5-of-7 3s) with five rebounds, one block, one steal, and two turnovers.

• One stat to tell the tale: Seattle U posted an effective field goal percentage of 36.9, a season low for a WSU opponent. Seattle shot just 3-of-21 on 3s (14%) and wasn’t much better on 2s (18-of-40, 45%).

Highlights

SATURDAY

#200 Portland - 74
#142 WSU - 104

In A Minute

• WSU improves to #127 in kenpom at 11-13 overall and 6-5 in the WCC, remaining in a tie for 4th place. Portland drops to #216 at 10-14 and 3-8, 10th place.

• Recap from our friend Nate Dahl at CougCenter

• Official stats

• Line o’ the night: EEMELI YALAHO with 26 points on 10 shots (5-of-6 3s) with nine rebounds, one assist, one steal, and zero(!) turnovers.

• One stat to tell the tale: The Cougs shot 16-of-31 from deep, continuing a trend of high-volume hot shooting from beyond the arc.

Highlights

Three Thoughts

1. Domination

As we mentioned at the top, WSU is now on a three-game winning streak. That’s nice, but as we’ve also said all along: This is the WCC, and the expectation is that WSU should win lots of games, as there are only a few teams in the conference that would be particularly competitive in the old Pac-12.

How you win matters — both for the vibes and for what these wins maybe tell us about the team moving forward down the home stretch of the season. And the Cougs were very, very good in both of these games, posting game scores above 90 in back to back games for the first time since wins over Northern Iowa and Portland last season. Put another way, they played like a top 25 team over the course of these two games.

The 12-point win over Seattle might not have been as aesthetically pleasing as the 30-point win over Portland, but it was no less impressive when considering how bad the Cougars looked against the Redhawks the first time around and how tough their defense is to crack. WSU held an average lead of 6.2 points against Seattle and 12.4 points against Portland, and in both games, the Cougs never dipped below their initial win probability. Neither game was ever really in doubt.

David Riley’s teams have become noted over the last couple of years for taking their foot off the gas at times, but these games featured very little of that. Impressive.

2. Continued improvement

One of our biggest complaints with Riley last season was that the team got worse as the season went along. He struggled to come up with solutions as the team cratered. They finally got back on track a bit at the end of the year, but the overall picture was not flattering — here’s a trend graph of WSU’s Game Scores from last season at barttorvik.com:¹

This year, though, we’ve seen marked improvement as the season has gone along. It certainly hasn’t been without its bumps in the road — recently, the loss to San Diego is still a head scratcher — but the improvement is undeniable. Here’s the same graph for this year:

Actually, it’s not quite the same graph — I left off the first two games of this year at the behest of one of our astute subscribers to the Slack; the Cougars were so very horrendous in those two games that it makes the improvement look more dramatic than it is, and Riley probably shouldn’t get credit for improving on being one of the worst teams in Division 1 out of the gate.

And the reality is that he doesn’t need it in order to look pretty good. Even without those, the improvement is noticeable and they’re trending toward finishing as a top 100-ish team. That’s still not where this program needs to be on a year-to-year basis, so I’m not going sit here and say that this is clear evidence that Riley is the man for the job long term — I remain unconvinced of that.

But it’s at least a good sign … and certainly better than the alternative when you consider that it sure looked for a while like the season might remain mired in abject disaster territory.

3. Incredible offense

The biggest driver of all this is some outrageous offense over the past nine games. Both Seattle and Portland posted their worst defensive performances of the season against us, and at this point the Cougs are making just about any team not named Gonzaga look silly.

In fact, over the last 10 games, barttorvik.com says WSU ranks 36th nationally in adjusted offensive efficiency — and that includes the offensive turd they laid at Climate Pledge Arena against Seattle.

Riley is, of course, known for being a bright offensive mind. But what’s fascinating to me isn’t that he’s molded these guys into a tremendous offense after they looked so inept early in the year — although that is impressive. Most interesting is that they have become basically unguardable because they can now score from pretty much anywhere on the floor.

When this streak of excellent offense started, the Cougs were doing the vast majority of their damage going to the rim, which has always been the bread and butter of a Riley offense, whether that was via ND Okafor postups or drives by Ace Glass and Jerone Morton. As teams have adjusted, the Cougars have now found open 3s more plentiful — and they are destroying teams with their shooting: Over these two games, WSU shot 24-of-50 from behind the arc (48%), and over the last six games, the Cougs are 72-of-162 (44%).

The return of Rihards Vavers has made a massive difference on that front, but that’s not all of it: Glass, Morton, Eemeli Yalaho and Simon Hildebrandt are all threats and making people pay.

Oh, and another shooter, Tomas Thrastarson, should return in the near future.

Teams that rely on all their scoring to come from beyond the arc are pretty volatile, so this uptick in shots from deep might worry some fans. But the Cougs have shown they don’t rely only on that, so they should still be able to score, even on cold shooting nights. There’s really no reason to think the offense isn’t here to stay.

4. Real defense?

The defensive results the last two games have been pretty good — certainly more than good enough when you pair it with the high octane offense the Cougs are currently rolling out.

But I think it remains an open question as to whether it means the defense is actually better. Seattle’s offense is putrid, and they shot the ball even worse against us than normal — including 3-of-21 from 3. Portland, meanwhile, basically had only one shooter we had to defend. That makes life quite a bit easier.

Now, I do want to point out: The Cougs have played other bad offensive teams and made them look like vintage Golden State Warriors. I’m not trying to look a gift horse in the mouth. But I’m inclined to chalk these ones up to shooting variance until I see a bit more evidence to the contrary.

Up Next: at #210 Oregon State

The Cougs had little trouble with the Beavers the first time around in Spokane, but this one is away, which always presents a bit different challenge. Adding to the weirdness is that OSU has been wildly inconsistent this season.

They’re on an upswing now with back-to-back road wins — over LMU and San Diego by a total of five points — but the Cougars are certainly still the better team. Still, because the game is away, both kenpom and barttorvik project the game to be basically a coin flip.

We’ll have more details about the matchup on this week’s podcast. Tip off is at 8 p.m. PT on Wednesday, and if you never ponied up for the ESPN+ sub, I’ve got great news: The game will be on CBS Sports Network! (Presuming your cable plan includes that 🙃 )

Questions or feedback? Leave a comment at the website or hit us up at [email protected].

If you like what you read, please share it with someone who you think would also like it by either forwarding it to them by clicking one of those social share buttons!

1  Just want to point out that the rankings you see on these graphs are via barttorvik.com and not kenpom.com. They’re very similar, but not exactly the same, in case that’s confusing.