With no game this past weekend, I hope you all got to enjoy a peaceful, no-stress weekend with family and/or friends, or that your actual responsibilities around your home finally got a little bit of attention. I went to a cross country meet at Chambers Bay, watched a bunch of soccer, and played some video games.

I also spent some time thinking about the Cougs, because I’m a sicko and that’s what I do.

The regular season is not quite 50% in the books — there are still seven games to go — but it certainly feels like we’re halfway home, thanks to the natural breaking point provided by the bye week. The Cougs are in a great position, sitting at 4-1 with an Apple Cup win and a victory over Texas Tech — and with their presumed toughest games behind them.

Which, as we learned last year, can be an extremely dangerous thing. It’s not quite a perfect comparison, considering that last year’s final seven games included Arizona (the Wildcats finished just outside the top 10), Oregon (the Ducks won the Fiesta Bowl and finished No. 6), and Washington (the Huskies made it to the CFP championship before getting stomped by Michigan). On paper, there’s not a team like that left on the 2024 schedule.

And yet, it’s hard not to see parallels. Both seasons featured emotional highs as the team soared to 4-0 before landing with a thud during the fifth game. Both of those losses came after some cracks showed through the week before; both came on the road; both featured pretty epic fourth-quarter meltdowns.

I don’t know what Jake Dickert has to do to make sure this season is different, but you can bet he’s devoted a ton of time to dissecting what went wrong 12 months ago and how not to repeat it this year. What was so strange about last season is that it was hard to pinpoint any one, singular, particular thing that doomed them. We can agree the offense, in general, just wasn’t good enough. But while they lost low scoring games, they also lost high scoring games and medium scoring games. Neither the offense or defense were good enough, but then the defense came around and the offense got worse, and then the kicker started missing kicks, and then the offense came around but the defense fell apart …

Which left us grasping for explanations like “they realized they weren’t going to play their way into a major conference and it deflated the entire team” and “clearly the players are distracted by all the NIL recruiters who are reaching out with transfer opportunities.” I have no idea if either of those things were actually true; I usually try to avoid playing armchair psychologist, but I just couldn’t come up with anything better, so those are the things I said and wrote.

At the very least, I think it’s fair to assume that last season’s team was dreaming big after getting to 4-0 with a win over Wisconsin and rising to a No. 13 ranking. I mean, we all did, so I’m sure they did too. The dream of winning the final Pac-12 title was reduced to a smolder in two weeks with consecutive losses to UCLA and Arizona, and it was extinguished completely the next week at in Eugene.

Whatever this team is dreaming of, those dreams are still very much alive, even in the wake of the loss to Boise State (which is now up to No. 17 in the AP poll after ripping Utah State). ESPN gives WSU a 1-in-5 chance of winning out and a 15% chance of making the CFP. Those two numbers are obviously very much tied together, and we can infer from the small delta between them that if we finish on 11-1, we’re very likely going to be ranked in the top 11 and selected for the playoff.¹ That’s a hell of a carrot.

Of course, the 2023 team still had a hell of a carrot after losing to the Bruins, and they got steamrolled by an Arizona team looking for blood the next week at home.

Perhaps it makes a difference that this bye week comes after a loss and not after ascending into the top 15 — there’s no joy in sniffing your own farts for a couple of weeks when you just got run over by the best player in the country and took a plane ride home wearing a three-TD ass kicking. While everyone almost always says that a bye week “comes at a perfect time,” I do think that’s true for these guys. It’s a perfect time to reset by digesting a bad loss that ought not to sit right, to do some self-scouting, and to make the necessary adjustments for this second “half.” Reinforcements also are on the way in the form of Carlos Hernandez (penciled in before the season as the No. 2 receiver) and Jamorri Colson (penciled in before the season as a starter at corner), both of whom are expected to return this week.

That said, my biggest fear is that the players end up looking at the remaining schedule and these probabilities the same way we do — that they “should” win all seven of these games. Dickert continues to preach a “one-game championship” mentality, but the roster is still filled with guys who were recruited to play in the Pac-12 against top-level competition, and it would be natural if they didn’t view the remaining opponents as “peers,” particularly after an opening stretch that wasn’t demonstrably different in quality than the opening five games of any other season. The reality of a Mountain West schedule (plus Oregon State) will set in at some point. Additionally, only three of the remaining seven games are at home, and those are generally considered to be against the worst teams of the bunch. Road games are rarely easy, even when you’re “better” than the home team.

Dickert is still a young coach, and I’m hopeful he figured out a thing or two from last season’s debacle. I think we’ll learn a lot this weekend. Beat Fresno State away from home — and do it convincingly — and we can all exhale and put last season behind us for good.

With that, let’s reflect on some stuff from the first five games.

When we talk about what might be different about this edition of the Cougs vs. last year, I can’t help but feel like there’s a different vibe around this squad, one that will hopefully keep them on track.

Every coach likes to call their team a family, and every coach preaches playing for the guy next to you. Not very many coaches actually are able to actually pull it off.

It feels to me like Dickert has gotten that through to this team. Perhaps that’s just results-based analysis as they sit here at 4-1; perhaps I would have said the same thing last year at 4-0. But there’s an earnest quality to this team, a togetherness and a caring that shows through in the smiles and the hugs and the consoling of a guy who doesn’t even play for them anymore. It just feels different to me than it did even when the team was riding high after beating Oregon State last September. I can’t really explain it, but I suppose that’s the nature of trying to explain “vibes.”

Programs eventually take on the personality of their coach, and Dickert seems to be about as genuine as they come. Now in his third full season in charge, I think that’s truly rubbing off on his team, and as a fan, it sure is nice to root for a bunch of guys who are so easy to get behind — particularly when the family ethos is such a huge part of what it means to be a Coug, whether you’re a football player or some schmuck on his couch with a newsletter.

This one was pretty easy. Mateer has been better than I ever imagined he could be, however imperfect that has been. We knew he could run after he was used as a change-of-pace QB the last couple of years, but we didn’t know how that might actually work out once he was out there every down.

Now, we know. Those legs are an incredible weapon — they pretty much single-handedly won the Apple Cup (from an offensive point of view, anyway) and have racked up 453 yards on the ground, nearly 130 yards more than the next closest rusher, running back Wayshawn Parker. Now consider that Mateer has taken 13 sacks for a total loss of 112 yards. If the NCAA didn’t count sacks against rushing (the NFL doesn’t), he’d be well on his way to a 1,000-yard season. That’s insane.

Quarterbacks have to do more than run, though, and that’s where Mateer has really impressed me. You might be thinking: Wait, what? But hear me out: He’s still not as polished of a passer as we’ve grown used to seeing on the Palouse, however, he’s growing week by week. I know I used this visual in last week’s newsletter, but I think it bears repeating — only the most cynical fan who refuses to get off their priors could look at this progression and not see a ton of growth:

Boise State was determined to eliminate our explosive passing plays, presumably thinking that Mateer either wouldn’t be accurate enough to pick them apart down the field, or that he would bite off more than he could chew at some point. He was fine on the former; he continues to struggle a bit with the latter.

It’s a trade-off I’m willing to make at this point because nothing we’ve seen suggests he’s incapable of reeling in the risky decisions he makes when he gets in his mind that he wants to go for a kill shot. He’s all of five starts into his career, and he’s getting better every week. I’m sure that improvement won’t continue to be this linear, but I’m beyond pumped to see where this ends up.

Here we are … again … for what seems like the 10th year in a row. In reality, it’s really only been since all the opt-outs from the 2021 Sun Bowl. But when you’re watching your team, two-and-a-half years of the QB running for his life seems like at least twice that, to say nothing of the inability to open holes for the running game.

The frustrating part here is that the line play looked at least OK through the first three games, which included matchups with Texas Tech and Washington. I don’t know exactly what the difference has been. Maybe it was always a mirage; maybe something actually has changed.

It sure seems like Washington found its most success by blitzing late the game, a blueprint San Jose State used. Boise State didn’t seem to blitz a whole lot until the game dictated that WSU had to pass in the fourth quarter, but they also had a bunch of success when they did. The Broncos also had a fair amount of success getting pressure with some pretty simple twists up front on the defensive line.

The one thing that has changed is the introduction of Fa’alili Fa’amoe, who has returned from a devastating knee injury and rotated in at right tackle the last couple of games. I think it’s legitimate to wonder if that has disrupted the continuity of the unit; Dickert alluded to that possibility during last week’s media availability, suggesting they’d settle on starting five.

Again, I’m hopeful that the bye week was able to provide some clarity here, and that these guys were able to get on the same page. Because relying on Mateer’s legs to bail the team out at every turn is not really an offensive strategy.

It’s game week again! Heading into the season, this road contest was considered to be one of the tougher MWC contests on the schedule, and while it still might be, a bit of the shine has come off it.

The Bulldogs are 3-2 with losses coming in the opener at Michigan — where a 20-point loss doesn’t have quite the same look it did a month ago — and at UNLV in their last game (two weeks ago) where the Rebels pasted them by 49. In between, they picked up wins over FCS Sacramento State, New Mexico State, and New Mexico — not exactly a murderer’s row.

The various efficiency metrics don’t really agree on the quality of either of these teams, but they do agree on one thing: Whatever the individual metric thinks of WSU, it thinks a lot less of Fresno State. The Prediction Tracker — which aggregates various predictive metrics — pegs the Cougs as a 60%(ish) favorite to win. This jives with the betting market, where the Cougars opened as 2.5-point favorites and have since climbed to 3 or 3.5, depending on where you look.

Fresno’s offense has been really inconsistent — in their wins (against the weaker opponents), they’ve scored 38 or more. In their losses, they’ve topped out at 10 points. The underlying stats, though, tell the story: They’re sitting at 79th in yards per play (5.67) even with those games against three of the weaker opponents you’ll find on anyone’s schedule. Only once (against New Mexico State, which is very, VERY bad) have they exceeded 6.5 ypp.

Quarterback Mikey Keane looks like an excellent passer on first glance: 270 yards per game, completing 67% of his passes, 8.1 yards per attempt, 7 TDs. But then you look a little closer: SIX interceptions. That’s good news for a WSU defense still trying to figure out its situation in the secondary — they’ll very likely have a chance to flip this game on its head with a turnover.

The defense, meanwhile, had actually been fairly decent on a per-play basis up until getting run over by UNLV. Even after giving up a whopping 8 ypp to the Rebels, the Bulldogs are still 63rd in that metric. Their strength is in creating turnovers: They have seven interceptions, three fumble recoveries. Granted, the vast majority of that came against their three worst opponents, but still — danger lurks.

The game kicks off at 4 p.m. PT on Saturday on FS1.