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Happy Super Bowl Sunday! In a few hours, I’ll be on my way to my dad’s house to watch the game with his and my family. As much as sports drive me nuts — and as many times as I say the folks who aren’t sports fans really are the smart ones — I’m also reminded that days like today are really special.

Not only because my favorite NFL team is playing for a championship for just the fourth time, but because I’ll get to watch my team play for that championship with both my dad and my kids. Sports are the thing my dad and I could always about, and we had Seahawks season tickets together for a long time — it’s how we primarily spent our time together. And the last time this happened, my kids were real small, so they don’t remember much about it.

My dad and I don’t do the tickets together anymore, but we’re going to be together today. And my kids are old enough and big enough as teenagers to know what’s going on this time — especially my youngest, who likes sports the way my dad and I do. (Sorry, Atticus.)

If you’re a Seahawks fan (or even if you’re Rick, our resident Pats fan in the Slack), I hope you also get to make some memories today with folks you love!

And maybe you’ll forget all about Cougar basketball for awhile!

#37 Santa Clara - 96
#132 WSU - 92

In A Minute

• WSU improves¹ to #127 in kenpom at 11-15 overall and 6-7 in the WCC, tied for fifth. Santa Clara drops to #38 at 21-5 and 12-1, still in first place.

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

• Official Stats

• Line o’ the night: ACE GLASS with 20 points, four rebounds, three assists, two steals, and three turnovers.

• One stat to tell the tale: Santa Clara shot 64% on their 44 2-point attempts.

Highlights

No win, no highlights from WSU, so here’s David Riley’s postgame interview.

Two Thoughts

1. Disastrous defense (again)

The Cougars have been terrible defensively more often than not under Riley, but yesterday might take the cake when it comes to awfulness. It wasn’t just the result, which was obviously bad: The Cougars gave up 96 points at a whopping 1.35 points per possession, neither of which (believe it or not) are a season worst.² It was the way it unfolded, which was about as discouraging as it could have been.

The utter lack of resistance in surrendering those points would have made an NBA all-star blush. The best example is in how Santa Clara’s Allen Graves accumulated his 30 points on just 14 shots. Here’s his shot chart:

Notice the clusters in the paint? Whenever Graves got the ball, he was trying to get to one of two spots. And the Cougars graciously allowed him to do it. Over. And over. And OVER. The announcers gushed about Graves, and I get it — he still has to make those shots, and he had a hell of a game. But if any college player is allowed to get to their favorite spots repeatedly, they’re almost certainly going to have a good game. Graves just happened to have a superlative one, but he got a lot of help from a defense that refused to make life difficult for him by redirecting him, or doubling him, or denying him the ball in the spots where he wanted to catch it.

What was most jarring was the perceptible intensity difference between the two teams when they were defending. The Broncos employ an “in your shorts” kind of switching, ball-pressure defense that demands the opponent work incredibly hard for anything they get (which makes the Cougars’ 92 points all the more impressive — more on that in a second). The Cougars, meanwhile, sag off of everyone, run under most screens, and look utterly lost on rotations when someone gets beat.

I understand that WSU doesn’t possess gifted defenders at every position, and that Herb Sendek has a long history of putting together pretty good defenses throughout his career — and that he recruits accordingly. But too often, the Cougs simply look like they really aren’t trying very hard on that end. In my experience, that isn’t actually because the players are lazy or whatever; it’s an extension of poor coaching where players are not drilled properly on technique and assignment which makes it look like a lack of effort.

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2. Lowering the ceiling

The putrid defense is overshadowing what we really ought to be able to celebrate, which is that the offense has become something that is actually borderline elite.

Scoring 1.30 points against Santa Clara is a really remarkable achievement — it’s the second-most the Broncos have given up this season. And the Cougs did it by bucking what the Broncos normally do best, which is take the ball away, primarily through steals. WSU had 13 turnovers (18% of possessions), which isn’t great, but it’s below both teams’ season marks. Combine that with the Cougs’ typically excellent 3-point shooting, and you get a great performance — one that’s not out of the norm at this point: Over their past 10 games, barttorvik.com ranks WSU 25th nationally in adjusted³ offensive efficiency.

That should be something to hang our hats on. But it’s not, because the defense is just that bad. Over those 10 games, WSU has only won four as the spectacularly terrible defense burned them against San Francisco, San Diego, Oregon State, and now Santa Clara.

Just to try and put into perspective just how much this defense is undermining the team, consider the following table. The Cougars scored 1.30 points per possession yesterday and still lost. Ken Pomeroy has been tracking tempo-free stats since 1997; here’s the entire list of games since then in which WSU has scored that efficiently and still failed to win:

That’s it. That’s the list. In 28 seasons, it happened once; it’s now happened three more times since Thanksgiving.

It’s nearly impossible for a team to win games consistently while being that bad on one end of the floor.⁴ With merely an average Division 1 defense, they’d have a winning record and be solidly locked into fourth in the WCC behind a trio of teams that will be in the NCAA tournament — not unlike many Pac-12 seasons over the years. We could probably talk ourselves into that being OK. But … that’s not where we’re at.

Until the defense improves, it literally doesn’t matter how good of an offensive coach Riley is — they’ll be nothing more than mediocre. I guess being entertaining and mediocre is better than being not entertaining and mediocre?

3. Close just isn’t good enough

You’ll note that the Cougs lost and improved their kenpom ranking. That’s happened a few times this year, and while I think it’s meaningful, there’s only so much solace even a fan like me can take in that — and I don’t blame any fan who takes no solace in it at all. Losing close to better teams matters as we try to evaluate how good the team and coach actually are, but ultimately wins and losses are all that really matter in the end. And when you combine an inability to beat good teams with the periodic losses to objectively bad teams, well, that’s how you lose fans.

Besides, we’re nearly out of runway for predictions to matter this season anyway: If the Cougs lose to Gonzaga on Tuesday, they’ll almost certainly finish the season without a winning record.

That would be the first time since Kyle Smith’s first season, in 2020.

Except now we play in the WCC and not the Pac-12.

This sucks.

Up Next: at #13 Gonzaga

Not much to say here, other than expectations are low — both kenpom.com and barttorvik.com give WSU a roughly 5% chance to win. That passes the smell test, given that the Gonzaga beat the Cougars handily in Pullman a few weeks ago.

But then again … the Bulldogs famously stumbled last weekend in a road loss to Portland … the Cougars beat Portland by 30. Sports!

Tip off is at 8 p.m. PT from Spokane with ESPN2 handling the broadcast.

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1  Sometimes this confuses people, but kenpom’s predictive system forecast an eight-point loss based on the quality of the teams, so losing by only four means we outperformed the prediction — that’s why our ranking improved, despite the loss.

2  Yesterday was actually third on the list of terrible performances: WSU gave up 100 points in regulation to Arizona State at a rate of 1.40 points per possession, and also gave up 96 points to San Diego at a rate of 1.37 points per possession. If we adjust for the quality of the opponent, it’s actually “only” the fifth-worst performance of the year (behind San Diego, ASU, San Francisco, Idaho, and Washington) because Santa Clara is a really good offensive team.

3  Anytime you see “adjusted,” it simply means that the number has been adjusted for the quality of the competition. In the case of adjusted offensive/defensive efficiencies, it’s how many points a team would be expected to score/give up against an average Division 1 team over 100 possessions.

4  Seattle U is finding this out, but in the opposite way, much as we did under Dick Bennett.