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In today's newsletter ...

• I like not the smell of this

• Who Impressed: Zevi Eckhaus

• What We Liked: The onside kick call

• What Needs Work: The onside kick execution

• Up Next: Colorado State

I like not the smell of this

One of my favorite TV shows of all time is The Good Place. If you’ve never seen it, well, you should fix that. It’s a masterpiece. I’m also going to ruin a major plot point to make my argument today, but the show ended in 2020, so whatever. You can still enjoy it even with this little bit of knowledge.

Anyway, the show is centered around four characters who die and end up in a “heaven”-like afterlife, where everything they want is there for them. It seems amazing! But, after a while, they realize that they’re actually pretty unhappy, and that the Good Place actually sucks. 

In fact, it sucks so hard that they come to a realization: WAIT — are we actually in the Bad Place?

I’m asking the same thing myself today.

It wasn’t entirely unexpected that we’d get beaten pretty badly by Washington in the Apple Cup. It was clear our roster had taken a step backward from last year, and Washington is Washington – they’ve generally had the better of us in terms of resources and results, but now they have a $30 million roster, as coach Jimmy Rogers pointed out postgame. The point spread was three touchdowns at kickoff. It was always going to be an uphill battle.

And yet, there was a level of futility on defense that cannot be described in any other way than deeply embarrassing and totally inexcusable. This was not Ohio State, Georgia, or even Oregon on the other side of the ball. This was Jedd Fisch and Washington, the team and coaching staff that wet itself in last year’s Apple Cup on the way to a losing record. Despite being 3-0, the Huskies have yet to secure even a single vote in the AP top 25 this year, and somehow they managed to do this in Pullman:

A brief reminder (not that you probably need one) that it came on the heels of this:

Not to put too fine a point on it, but in the last two weeks, the Cougars have been on the field for 19 non-kneel down defensive drives, and they’ve given up TDs on 15 of them. That’s mind boggling. It’s also been six full quarters since they’ve stopped their opponent from scoring. This is a level of futility that we haven’t seen since the years of … well, you know who. 

And that’s what has got me feeling some kind of way today. Losing, I can handle. Goodness knows, we’ve all had to learn how to do that. But losing like this is just a little too reminiscent of a lost era of Cougar football where a combination of poor talent and worse coaching led to a hole that not even Mike Leach could dig out of in fewer than three years. 

It seems that a good number of folks want to hand wave a lot of this away by saying that Rogers put together the best team that he could given that he was hired just before New Year’s, and what did we expect was going to happen with the mass defections that followed Jake Dickert’s departure? It’s true that Rogers was put in a tough spot, but I’m highly skeptical that he was absolutely forced to bring 16 guys from South Dakota State with him to fill out the roster, 10 of them on defense. The players started flowing nearly immediately from Brookings after he was hired. Taking them on was his choice.

But let’s say, for argument’s sake, that I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on that one – that taking all those guys really was the best possible choice, that this is the maximum amount of talent that could have been acquired.

Even if I stipulate that our talent level is far from Washington’s and that the talent disparity played a clear role in the result … does that explain all the scheme and technique breakdowns we’ve watched over the last two weeks?