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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? 

Does the talent level explain why WSU’s defensive ends repeatedly failed to set the edge on the line, leading to huge runs by the Huskies? It wasn’t like the ends were getting blown into oblivion by UW’s tackles; our ends just … didn’t do it. 

Does the talent level explain why WSU’s pass rush has lacked integrity in its lanes, leaving the middle wide open for QB scrambles? I know it’s sort of pick your poison, but the top rule of pass rushing is that the QB shouldn’t be able to escape up the middle.

Does the talent level explain why a corner’s poor leverage got him turned around and roasted by pretty simple double moves down the field?

That’s coaching, man. That’s how you get results of -8, -3, 2, and -6 on the first plays of UW’s first four drives, and then give up 25, 26, 45, and 26 on the second plays of those very same drives. The consistency is just non-existent. 

“We need to get back to the basics of just doing the basics better and it's not always about trying to protect all of the players all the time in the scheme and the coverage,” Rogers said after the game. “We’ve got to be able to execute just the basic fundamentals of wrapping up and making plays and tonight we failed at that.”

Rogers is quick to point out that these things are “on me,” to which I’ll say: Yes, it is! Rogers has been the coach of the team since January and has gone through spring practices, fall camp, and four games with them. The season is one-third over. And we’re talking about “getting back to basics”?

What makes it even more mind boggling is that you would think that bringing a whole bunch of his guys with him – defensive coordinator Jesse Bobbit held that role at South Dakota state for the past two seasons, and the defense features six starters who transferred from there – would mean that a lot of what he and Bobbit wanted to implement would have already been taught. Two of those transfers were FCS all-Americans, so while the top end might not be there from an FBS talent perspective, the floor should have been raised. These are, for the most part, his guys – most of whom are redshirt seniors from a program that is used to executing and winning. And that unit is absolutely flailing out there. 

Besides: Even intimating that the outcome of this season was preordained by the transfer portal sounds a little too much like “Bill Doba left Paul Wulff an empty cupboard and scholarship reductions” for my liking. The coach still has to coach, and right now? I’m not seeing a lot of evidence that these guys are up for the job. 

That’s perhaps most clear in the way that the team has eventually folded the last couple of weeks. It happened a lot later in this one than it did against North Texas, but it did still happen. The Cougars did not fight and scrap all the way until the final whistle; instead, once the offense finally ran out of steam and lost contact with the Huskies in the fourth quarter, a sad hangdog look set in on both sides. And that was that. 

We’ve seen this all before. We lived it for four excruciating years. We know what it looks like.

We’ve been to The Bad Place.

I’m not saying that Rogers is undeniably Paul Wulff 2.0. Perhaps the challenges really were insurmountable, and better days are ahead with the benefit of a full recruiting cycle. Maybe he just needed to really see what it would take to win at this level after spending his entire adult life in and around FCS.

But the fact that we’ve already got even a faint whiff of that stink after just four games is incredibly alarming.

The game was not without its positives on the offensive side. As we had been hearing toward the end of the week, Rogers did indeed make the move from Jaxon Potter to Eckhaus, and it proved to be a good choice. While the defense was unable to mount even minor resistance, the offense did its best to keep up, trailing by just a touchdown heading into the fourth quarter.

And that was pretty much all Eckhaus making that happen. The running game was nonexistent again (14 carries, 24 yards for running backs), so they put it on Eckhaus’ arm. It worked, for the most part: Through three quarters, he’d thrown for 238 yards on 21-of-24 attempts with two TDs, and the offense was picking up 6.4 yards per play. For context, the offense gained 3.9 YPP against Idaho, 5.1 against San Diego State, and 4.4 against North Texas. The fourth quarter happened, and we can’t erase that, but those first three quarters are pretty solid proof of concept with Zevi in charge.

Yeah, there were the two interceptions … but I can really only get worked up about the first one. It was a bad decision. Even if he had been able to step into the throw instead of the ball fluttering because he was hit, I’m pretty sure the primary defender would have just picked it off instead of tipping it for someone else to catch. The second one, though? I mean, it’s fourth down, you know you have to score to keep up, and I think making an extremely risky throw under pressure is justified. It just, once again, ended with the worst possible outcome.

And I don’t even actually blame him for the fumble. Maybe he could have secured it a little better to make sure the defender couldn’t punch it like that, but a punch that clean is going to dislodge the ball from any carrier. And, of course, fumble luck was once again not our friend. So it goes.

The game was, I think, a great example of what you get from Eckhaus: A lot of good with a bit of risk. It’s not ideal, but it’s a tradeoff that’s certainly worth it right now — especially when you factor in his leadership qualities, which I think were pretty plainly on display.

Maybe the coaching staff deserves some stick for him not being the starter in week 1. I’m not ready to go down that road yet, mostly because I think the only game where the outcome is maybe different if he’s the starter is UNT — and that seems like a stretch to say that he would have been the difference in a seven-TD loss.

Maybe I’ll embrace revisionist history a little more aggressively if we end the season 5-7 and that ends up being the reason we miss a bowl game.

HONORABLE MENTION: Devin Ellison did not disappoint in his debut. He clearly brings a level of athleticism to a wide receiver group that desperately needs it — he was able to win some one-on-one matchups in a way that we haven’t seen from the other guys. Can’t wait to see more of him.

I, for one, love it when my coaches make aggressive calls that are supported by evidence. And in this case, the evidence was clear that we were going to need to somehow gain an extra possession. Washington didn’t seem inclined to give us the ball for free with its offense, so a surprise onside kick was a perfectly reasonable approach in that moment. Kudos to Rogers for having the guts to call it …

… but holy hell man, if you’re going to call it, your team better damn well execute. Especially if you’re telling us — as Rogers did postgame — that they worked on it all week, and that Washington had shown them the exact look they wanted on the previous kickoffs.

Just another frustrating development in a season that is increasingly becoming full of them.

Now it’s time to go back on the road for the first of three consecutive games away from Pullman. This is easily the most plausible of the three to pick up a win (trips to Mississippi and Virginia immediately follow), even as the Cougs are currently 3.5-point underdogs to the Rams.

CSU is coming off a narrow loss to UTSA, which followed a narrow win over FCS Northern Colorado, which followed a 17-point loss at Washington to open the season. Scoring points has been the Rams’ biggest problem so far, as they’re averaging just 19.3 points — 117th nationally. That’s been a consistent problem throughout Jay Norvell’s tenure in Fort Collins, and that includes when he had current Seahawks breakout Tory Horton catching passes for the past three years.

So, they’re going to the same well as WSU: New QB this week! Redshirt sophomore Jackson Brousseau came off the bench on Saturday to nearly led CSU to victory with a pair of TD drives, so Norvell is going to try and ride a hot-ish hand this week. He was 10-of-12 for 78 yards and a TD with one rush for six yards in that brief appearance.

If the defense can’t show some life this week …

Kickoff is at 4:30 p.m. PT with the game to be broadcast on CBS Sports Network.