If you’re a loyal podcast listener and reader of the newsletter, you surely know that there is not a realm in which I imagined WSU’s season going like this.
I said we should expect the Cougars to immediately be a conference contender. I said eight wins was the baseline. All of this was predicated on the assumption that WSU should be able to simply maintain the level of quality it was able to sustain through its two years in the wilderness after the disintegration of the Pac-12. Even on our third coach in three years, that didn’t seem like a crazy idea — we did it last season, turning over most of the roster, and there was a lot of internal hype surrounding the talent acquisition of coach Kirby Moore and his GM Brad Larrondo.
That prediction has … not aged well. Obviously. But the degree to which it has deviated from that expectation has really left me reeling. A worst-case scenario in my mind was losing three of the first four and then simply getting bowl eligible after going a pedestrian 5-3 in the new Pac-12. Now, with seven games left to play and only one win in the bank after Saturday’s demoralizing loss to Fresno State, ESPN’s FPI metric predicts WSU will win just two games the rest of the way. If you’re inclined to hand-wave that, consider that FPI thought Fresno State was a 2-to-1 favorite on Saturday, bucking the betting line that favored WSU by a couple of points.
Unsurprisingly, folks are down bad, to the point that some on the premium Slack have even begun to throw around the one word that is synonymous with WSU football failure — and not in a hyperbolic way as a piece of rhetoric, but as an honest-to-goodness assessment of exactly where we are right now. Being ranked 102 out of 138 teams by FPI does, indeed, seem … Wulffian. Hence, the graphic above, which came from the thumbnail from our (very angry) postgame reaction show that we recorded minutes after the game ended on Saturday. It’s meant a little tongue-in-cheek. But not totally.
You might think this is an overreaction, even if there aren’t any 69-0 beatdowns currently in our wake. I’ve found that it’s hard for folks to grapple with the idea that literally anything could approach those dark days. But I promise you: It’s actually not at all disingenuous to compare at least some of what’s happening now with what happened then.
For example: I’m sure you remember the 2008 and 2009 offenses being very, very bad. Well, guess what? This offense has been worse!
It can be hard to compare units across years, but gameonpaper.com has college football analytics all the way back to 2004. The primary metric is something called “expected points added” or EPA. If you have a deep need to understand EPA, you can click this little footnote for an explanation.1 If you don’t really care to read any of that and just want to trust me that it’s a solid way of evaluating teams and players, consider the following chart (which includes FBS vs. FBS games only):
“Adj EPA/Play” is expected points added per play adjusted for opponent — which means we can compare different seasons with different schedules and different scoring environments. And right now, WSU’s offensive adjusted EPA per play — all the way down in the lower right corner — is the worst on record: -0.33, vs. -0.26 in 2008 and -0.24 in 2009. Every time the Cougars run a play this season, they are expected to score a third of a point less than they were expected to score before the play. That, my friends, ranks dead last in FBS — 138 out of 138. And there’s no need to be like, well, they played three pretty good teams in their first four games. This accounts for that!
So, let it sink in: With the supposedly bright offensive mind of Moore at the helm to replace the defensively minded Jimmy Rogers, not only are the Cougars much worse on offense than they were last season, WSU now has the worst offense in all of college football. Not even Paul Wulff — whose first two offenses finished 118th and 119th (out of 120) — sunk quite that low.
Anyone who’s watched the team knows why the Cougars are keeping this kind of company — the ability to throw the ball is powerfully correlated with the ability to score, and WSU can’t throw the ball. So, here’s another chart that backs up what your eyes have seen for you to cringe at:
gameonpaper.com
Thanks to UTEP, WSU only ranks 137th in EPA per dropback (-0.34).
Nothing really is going right with the passing attack, as the line and receivers aren’t exactly covering themselves in glory. But it’s objectively undeniable that the largest share of the blame pie resides with quarterback Caden Pinnick. Here’s another cringy table for you to contextualize Pinnick’s play — these are the worst EPA/Dropback seasons for WSU on record. You will surely recognize these guys:
What’s even more stunning is when you sort the QBs by just raw EPA, which is cumulative. Consider that Pinnick has “accumulated” his total EPA in just four games (remember, no FCS):
That’s about -11.4 EPA per game. Again, in layman’s terms: Pinnick’s passing alone has made WSU likely to score 11 fewer points than it otherwise would be expected to. If Pinnick were to continue to start and drop back as much as he has to this point, he would finish with around -125 EPA, well beyond anyone else on this list. He’s not just not helping us score, he’s actively harming our ability to do so.2
So … what to do about it? WSU simply must get better play from the position, and I think the only real way to make big improvement there is to change the quarterback — the reason nobody else has accumulated -125 EPA is because they got benched or injured before they could play enough to drop that low. However, I’ve been assured by folks who watched practices that Pinnick has been head and shoulders above Julian Dugger and Owen Eshelman. Given that Moore just kept sending Pinnick out there on Saturday as the game devolved from “tough start” to “challenging day” to “unmitigated disaster” to “burn it all down” — even as the contest hung in the balance — we can make some reasonable assumptions about Moore’s belief in the likelihood that a QB change would improve anything.
In lieu of changing starters, Moore has announced that he’ll take over the play calling duties, and offensive coordinator Matt Miller will focus more of his attention on coaching Pinnick, specifically. It’s certainly better than nothing, but I’m extremely skeptical it produces anything more than marginal improvement — and when your starting point is “worst in FBS,” marginal improvement still leaves you in very, very bad shape. I’ll even add that I don’t think playcalling was a particular problem on Saturday, at least in the first half; there seemed to be a lot of plays available to be made by the quarterback and Pinnick just couldn’t make them, either failing to pull the trigger on open passes, or running himself into trouble from a relatively clean pocket. I’m not sure why we’d expect that to change with someone else calling plays.
It also wouldn’t change the palpable lack of confidence the team has in Pinnick. The last time I remember an offense looking as demoralized and defeated as it did in the second half was during Mike Leach’s first season as the Cougs struggled mightily to implement the Air Raid. Every player on that field on Saturday looked like they knew the offense had no chance, which turned everything on that side of the ball into a death spiral. That alone, in my opinion, is enough reason to swap QBs, even if you’re pretty convinced the guy you’re bringing in is not as good. Eshelman would be my choice, given that we’ve seen what Dugger can (and can’t) do. But ultimately, I think Moore should turn to whichever guy has the “fuck it” kind of swagger that we definitely haven’t seen from Pinnick.
The truth is that we aren’t really headed for Wulff Town. At least not yet.
The defense, which has been fine, is making sure of that. On their backs, WSU has been able to remain competitive in most of the games, which couldn’t be said in 2008 and 2009. But with the offense having clearly sunk to that level — at least so far — we’re in big danger of ending up with our worst record since Paul Wulff was coach, despite the overall schedule being easier than ever.
And maybe that’s the point of hope: While Wulff faced a relentless march through the legacy Pac-12, providing no real respite for the weary to try and figure things out, Moore at least gets to travel to a place like Utah State on Friday (FPI: 95).
But something has to change. If it doesn’t, the comparisons to that bleak time in WSU history that heretofore seemed unimaginable will only become louder and louder.
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1 The shortest, best definition of EPA that I can find comes from this long explainer by Mike Sando at The Athletic: “How much a team’s scoring expectation changes after a play.” His explainer is for the NFL, but the concept is exactly the same for college, even if the expected points values are a little different: Every spot on the field at any given down and distance at any given time of the game has an expected point value for the offense, and each play either increases the likelihood they’ll score on the drive or decreases it. The EP calculations are pretty simple: With tens of thousands of plays in college football data, we can know exactly how many points teams score, on average, when they face 3rd-and-7 from their own 40 in the second quarter with 7 minutes to play — or whatever. For example, let’s say first-and-goal from the 1 is worth 6 expected points (this isn’t the exact number, by the way, just ballpark for simplicity), since there would be a very high likelihood the team would score a TD. An actual TD would be worth 7 points, given the extra point, so the expected points added would be +1: 7 actual points after the play - 6 EP before the play = +1 EPA. Now let’s say, instead of scoring, a running back is tackled for a four-yard loss. Now it’s second-and-goal from the 5; since teams score TDs less often from there, it’s now worth 3.5 expected points (again, I’m making this number up for the illustration). That running back contributed -2.5 EPA because the team is now less likely to score than it was before: 3.5 expected points after the play - 6 expected points before the play = -2.5 EPA. This is added up all over the field after all the plays to determine the effectiveness of not just units as a whole, but also individual contributions.
2 I’ll also point out that the rushing attack isn’t much better: -0.24 EPA per rush, 136th in FBS. But that’s still much better than Pinnick’s -0.34 EPA per dropback. At the risk of being too simplistic (and maybe even a little obtuse), we’d be more likely to score if we simply ran the ball on every play.
