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In today's newsletter ...

• In Search of Offensive Identity

• What We Liked: Defensive dominance

• Who Impressed: Jaxon Potter

• What Needs Work: Run blocking

• Up Next: San Diego State

In Search of Offensive Identity

There are a number of words that come to my mind to describe Washington State’s season-opening win over Idaho. Among them: uninspiring, irritating, unsatisfying. 

But ultimately? 

Adequate.

None of us want the Cougs to need a field goal with seconds left to beat Idaho, with all the annoying and seemingly unnecessary heartburn it caused along the way. But also, we all lived through losing to Portland State in 2015 and Eastern Washington in 2016; some of you, like me, might have also lived through back-to-back losses to Idaho in 1999 and 2000.¹ And, as someone in our Premium Membership Slack pointed out, Jimmy Rogers is the first coach to win his first game in charge at WSU since Bill Doba did it in 2003.

So. Yeah. Wins are good enough right now – even the ugly ones.

What made it so ugly, of course, is that the offense was a proper mess right from the beginning. WSU is the school of We Throw The Ball And Score Points, and watching us come out so conservative with ineffective runs was like … OK, we thought there was going to be a pretty big philosophy shift, but maybe we weren’t prepared for one that was this big. Compounding the confusion was Jaxon Potter, probably the most non-running QB on the roster, making the “surprise” start. 

Were we truly turning into Run First U? Did they just not trust Potter with bad field position?

Things opened up on the third drive, and we saw exactly what Potter could do: Six passes in eight plays, ending with a TD. But then it got janky again as the team continued to be unable to run the ball and Potter missed a couple of good looks. This continued into the third quarter, when Rogers eventually made the bizarre decision to replace Potter with Julian Dugger following a turnover that gave the Cougs incredible field position on Idaho’s 18-yard-line. 

I suppose there’s an argument to be made that it’s a perfect, no-pressure time to put in the new guy, which Rogers said he did in order to try and jumpstart the running game. I think I would agree with that if we were up by a couple of TDs, but we weren’t: The game was close, a second TD could have effectively ended it (with the way the defense was playing), and I think your best chance at getting a TD was from the guy who had been playing. 

It should be noted that it nearly worked out, if not for a legitimately shoestring tackle on a Dugger scramble where he’d broken contain and might have scored. But it didn’t work out, we settled for a field goal, and then Idaho answered back with that ridiculous drive to make it a game. 

Then … Dugger came out again. A bad snap over his head led to a huge loss, and he never really had a chance from there. Potter came back in, had a successful pass (to Tony Freeman, who was great in the second half), but it was sandwiched between unsuccessful runs, the last of which was a disastrous fumble by Angel Johnson, who looked like the least effective of the running backs despite being the starter.

It all turned out fine in the end with Potter’s great drive to set up the winning field goal, but that really only added to the incredible sense of disjointedness and lack of identity that we are not at all used to seeing out of our offenses. If we can throw it this well, why are we banging our head against a wall with bad runs and weird substitutions?

It looked to me like the coaching staff really wasn’t sure what it had or what its strengths would be and how that would fit with what they’d like to do. I suspect a lot of that has to do with this being such a transition year and therefore the roster not being populated with guys who are ideal for how they’d like to attack defenses. So, they tinkered to a pretty extreme degree during the game – far more than we’d typically see, even in game one.

It made for a supremely ugly and tense game, but I do think there’s something to the idea that the only way to truly figure out what they’ve got and how they can do things – despite how hard the coaches tried to simulate it with live reps during camp – is in an actual game. There’s an old saying that the biggest improvements come between the first game and the second game, and I suspect that will be true here: Rogers and offensive coordinator Danny Freund now have a much better idea about what they’ve got and how they might deploy it most effectively.

Next week will tell us much more about what we’ve actually got on our hands. For now, I’m satisfied with learning a bunch and securing a win.

What We Liked: Defensive dominance

We’ve talked almost none about the defense, which is the nature of being a fan but also is a bit of a travesty, given how great the fellas on that side of the ball played.

Rogers’ experience as a player and coach was all on the defensive side prior to becoming a head coach, so I know I expected more out of the defense out of the gate. They certainly delivered: 221 total yards allowed at a clip of 3.4 yards per play. For context, the last time they allowed a YPP that low was against Stanford in 2023 (3.1); going back to 2016 – as far back as cfbstats.com’s game logs go – it was just the eighth time the Cougs held an opponent under 4.0.² The major driver of that was allowing just 33 passing yards at 1.7 yards per attempt, as the Vandals had exactly zero explosive passing plays. (They could have had one, but it was dropped/stripped downfield.)

I have no idea if Idaho’s offense is any good. It probably isn’t. But those are eye-popping numbers against any opponent. The defense looked disciplined on the back end and – as the broadcast noted ad nauseam – they rallied to the ball in a way that we really haven’t seen since the Speed D days.

I remain a bit concerned about our size up front, and I’m a little disappointed we didn’t get home for any sacks – the pass rush integrity that allowed Joshua Wood to scramble repeatedly will be a point of emphasis this week, I’m sure – but if the biggest criticism I can levy at the defense is “they gave up one (1) touchdown on a 16-play, 75-yard drive on which the opponents converted 3rd or 4th down four times,” well, that’s a pretty damn good day. Very few offenses are going to have sustained success nibbling their way down the field like that.

Who Impressed: Jaxon Potter

Listen: I’m not going to sit here and try to tell you Potter had a great day or anything. But the reality is that we have been damn spoiled by quarterbacks at this school, and if you watch many other teams in college football, you know just how many bad quarterbacks are out there.

If you divorce yourself from the aesthetics of the game and just evaluate his stat line – 24-of-31 (77%), 209 yards (6.7 ypa), 1 TD, 0 INTs – that’s a perfectly solid day for a guy making his first start. If you don’t divorce yourself from the aesthetics of the game and take into account the schizophrenic management of the offense, I honestly think that line looks even better – particularly since about a quarter of those yards came on the team’s final drive, on which Potter was 6-of-6 for 48 yards and looked like absolute nails when the pressure was at its highest. 

When Potter was allowed to just throw, he did fine – not perfect, obviously, but very well. It’s going to be extremely interesting to see how Freund and Rogers balance Potter’s strengths with their philosophy, because it sure looks like they need to take the handcuffs off a little bit.

What Needs Work: Run blocking

This part of the newsletter was probably the easiest and most obvious to write: The run blocking was absolutely putrid. I’m not sure how far back we have to go in order to remember one that was quite this bad, but it might be all the way back to Mike Leach’s first season in 2012. 

Worse than their inability to really open any holes was the manner in which it happened, by consistently getting bullied up front as the Vandals repeatedly shoved blockers into the backfield. Maybe there was a technique situation at play that can be fixed, maybe there was a lack of comfort with the scheme was causing hesitation, maybe … I dunno … something?? … but when you’re getting pushed around by Idaho, that’s pretty scary for the way the rest of the season shapes up.

However: If we go back to where we started and conclude that Freund was largely trying to figure out what he’s got, perhaps they’ll be able to dial in the types of runs that will allow this line to be successful. I think Potter showed enough that if you can do that, he can get you some big plays with his arm, even if he’s only being asked to throw 30 times a game or so.

Up Next: San Diego State

The Aztecs come to Pullman on Saturday for another night game – 7:15 p.m. PT on the CW. It’s Homecoming! In early September! Hooray? 

The Cougs opened as 6.5-point favorites, per vegasinsider.com, but that’s since dropped to 1.5. Make of that what you will.

1  It should be noted, I guess, that Idaho was FBS back then.

2  The 2017 defense did it four(!) times: Montana State, Nevada, at Oregon(!) and Colorado.