This is where the rubber meets the road for the Cougars, who have three games remaining to secure two victories and thus guarantee a non-losing season propel them into a bowl game in Jimmy Rogers’ first season.

Two of them are at home, and while the road game — next week at James Madison — is far from unwinnable, there’s little doubt that this one and the season-ending rematch against Oregon State are WSU’s most probable chances for victories.

The Cougs are coming off their second bye, and while it’s usually cliche to say that the bye came at the perfect time, I’m not sure you could accuse me of being cliche when I say it right now. Not only should the week off allow a number of important players who have been injured to get back on the field — which is, by far, the most important thing — it also allows us to get a bit of much needed distance from the stench of that befuddling loss to the Beavers.¹

Are the Cougars ready to bounce back? They’ve shown a lot of resiliency this year following poor and frustrating performances.

Consensus via VegasInsider.com.

Trends: WSU is 5-4 ATS, having beat the spread four straight times before losing to OSU as a favorite. Louisiana Tech is 6-3 ATS, but has beaten the spread just once in their last four. WSU has gone under the number in five straight, and Louisiana Tech has gone under the number in 6 of 9 — though they’d gone over in two straight before last weekend.

Aggregate predictive model probabilities: 70% to win, 52% to cover (at -7.5)

The biggest question coming out of last game was whether Jimmy Rogers would consider making a change at quarterback after the OSU debacle. He gave absolutely no indication this week that he was even considering such a move. That doesn’t mean that a change is impossible, but it does mean that No. 4 is very likely going to be back out there on Saturday.

It’s hard to quantify just how bad the passing game was against OSU, but here’s one measure: Through the lens of “Expected Points Added,” each dropback made it dramatically less likely the Cougs would be expected to score on the drive.² It was the nadir of a disturbing three-game trend in which the passing attack contributed negative EPA to the offense, due in large measure to six interceptions. It is very tough to score points with an ineffective passing game, as we’ve seen.

To that end, I’ve got some not great news: Tech is No. 21 nationally in yards per passing attempt and they’ve got more interceptions (15) than TDs allowed through the air (13). Senior safety Jakari Foster is the guy to watch; he leads the team with four picks. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the Bulldogs have played one of the weakest schedules in the country, but still — I’d feel a lot better if they were a bit more swiss-cheesy on the back end.

Which means a lot of the burden here could fall to the running attack — I say “could” because who knows what kind of nonsense offensive coordinator Danny Freund will cook up this week. The rush attack has gotten steadily better all season, but again … Louisiana Tech is a pretty decent defense against the run.

We said all these things about Toledo, too. And the Cougs did enough to make the defensive performance in that one stick, even if it was ugly for ¾ of the game. Maybe they can conjure at least that today.

Good news! The Bulldogs are bad on offense. Outside of lighting up Sam Houston State, they’ve only eclipsed 6 yards per play one time, and that’s been against some pretty atrocious competition. They really, really try to run the ball, but they’re quite bad at it: Again, excluding Sam Houston State, they haven’t exceeded 4.0 yards per carry since mid-September despite averaging nearly 40 rushes a game. They’ll use a combination of running backs and quarterbacks to try and move the ball on the ground.

Yes, quarterbacks, plural. Blake Baker, who had been starting since week 3, is out with an ACL. Which means we very likely will see both Evan Bullock and Trey Kukuk today. Kukuk was the starter out of camp before getting benched; Bullock has only appeared in relief. Kukuk is definitely more the runner of the two.

Because La Tech runs the ball 60% of the time, they really try to make the passes count — and they sometimes do an OK job of that, though their yards per attempt fluctuate pretty wildly, indicating a willingness to take shots on potentially high-reward throws.

When you put these two offenses and two defenses together in the same game … well, there’s a reason the over/under number has been plummeting since it opened. This one will probably be yet another rock fight.

The list is long, but the news is generally encouraging! From Rogers’ news conference on Monday - designations mine, based on my interpretation of Rogers’ comments

Playing:

Probable:

Questionable:

Out:

As one of our readers likes to say on the premium slack, it’s kind of insane that WSU needs to cater the offense to a 5th year senior with hundreds of passes under his belt in order to keep him from tanking their chances of winning, but by golly, that’s where we are with the Cougs. Rogers has apparently made his bed with Zevi Eckhaus, for better or worse.

It wasn’t that long ago that I said Eckhaus was the right QB for this team, but that was after Toledo and before he threw two more back-breaking interceptions in the worst game of his career against the worst FBS team WSU has played this year.

Against Toledo, WSU was able to scheme enough work with his legs to make that an asset, and it led to a 2nd quarter scoring outburst that provided the necessary margin. Against OSU … that didn’t happen. Which meant you got none of the benefit of Zevi’s athleticism over erstwhile starter Jaxon Potter and all of the downside — repeated risky throws and an inconsistent passing game.

How does WSU try to manage his risk today? I’d manage it by simply starting a different quarterback. But Rogers isn’t going that route. Can they get back to something approximating what they did against Toledo, which would have been enough to beat OSU and probably will be enough to win today?

Here are some other games you might want to watch today. All game times PT.

No. 10 TEXAS at No. 5 GEORGIA (-4.5) — 4:30 p.m. | ABC

App State at JAMES MADISON (-20.5) — 12:30 p.m. | ESPN+

OREGON STATE at Tulsa (-1.5) — 10 a.m. | ESPN+