On Saturday, the Cougars fell behind by 31(!) before halftime(!!) to Santa [f----ing] Clara(!!!) at Beasley Coliseum(!!!!), before going on to lose by 30. It was the third loss in a row by more than 20 points; two of those came in front of home crowds.

You, a normal person: “Wow, that’s really bad.”

Me, a not normal person: “Yes, it is! And also — I wonder just how bad it actually is? How does this bad compare to other badness we’ve watched? Maybe I could write a couple thousand words about it!”

I understand if this isn’t your particular flavor of masochism, but I’ve become a little obsessive with trying to contextualize this fall from grace, which our Premium Subscribers can attest to, given my my many posts about it on our members-only Slack. The way this season has imploded is just so unusual that, for me, it’s become a bit like driving past a 10-car pileup on the freeway and being unable to avert my eyes.

The difference here, though, is that — for the first time in a long time — I’m barely actually watching anymore. On Saturday, I spent the day in Seattle celebrating my youngest’s 13th birthday. I made no effort to avoid the score, no plan to watch it when I got home. When I opened the ESPN app at halftime, I let out an involuntary chuckle. Because at this point, laughing is better than crying. Perhaps you’re in a similar spot. (I still haven’t watched it.)

But, as I typically do, I still spent some time digging into the stats after the game. And after examining this smoldering wreckage of a season for the past few weeks weeks, I think there’s a pretty strong argument to be made that this is now as bad as any season of WSU basketball in the last 20 years.⁴

I realize that’s quite a statement, particularly in the context of other really awful seasons we’ve witnessed over that time period, such as Ken Bone’s final couple of seasons and all of Ernie Kent’s tenure. David Riley’s first squad won’t finish with as poor of an overall record as those teams, nor will the Cougs finish as low in the advanced rankings as them. In the historical context of WSU men’s basketball — when all 29 games are taken into account — this season actually is merely a below average season. In fact, if WSU wins just one more game in their final three, these Cougs will finish with more wins than each of Kyle Smith’s first two teams, and probably finish with a higher advanced ranking than both of them, too. (Although, at this point, wins against San Diego and Pepperdine probably shouldn’t be taken for granted.)

And yet … it feels so much worse. And I think it’s perfectly reasonable to conclude that it actually is so much worse.

A quick note: I’m going to use barttorvik.com for stats and rankings in this rather than kenpom.com. Three reasons: 1) The entirety of Bart’s site is free to everyone, which means you can go investigate yourself if you so desire; and 2) The rankings are pretty similar, following similar methodology, and 3) Bart’s site makes graphs, and I really like graphs!

The path of the season is well documented, but here’s a quick recap:

Put their rankings at each game in a graph, and it looks like this:

Since Torvik started his rankings in 2008, the delta between WSU’s highest ranking and current ranking this year is the biggest it’s ever been: Minus-56. The only other WSU season in the same ballpark is 2018: Kent’s team won an early season holiday tournament by beating San Diego State and Saint Mary’s with Malachi Flynn and Robert Franks, fueling a massive climb from 242 in the preseason to 142 after about a third of the games had been played. They then finished by losing 15 of their last 19, plummeting to 195 — a delta of minus-53.

That’s obviously not the kind of company Riley wants to keep. And while the distance from the peak to the valley is about the same, there are reasons to view this as significantly worse — largely because the peak was so much higher.

Following those opening 16 games, everything was pointing to WSU being either squarely on the NCAA tournament bubble or certainly within breathing distance of it; Torvik’s system — which incorporates predicted results the rest of the season — put WSU’s tournament chances at about 30%. That’s pretty damn high for a team that started the year outside bubble territory, and the possibility of going to back-to-back tournaments under two different coaches — something never done before at WSU — was intoxicating. It felt like maybe WSU had cracked some kind of code and wouldn’t miss a beat under Riley.

Those odds were slashed in half in the next game by the first loss to Pacific. After getting whipped by Gonzaga in Spokane, the odds dipped under 10%. By the time they lost to Santa Clara (for the first time) a couple of weeks later, those odds had dropped to a miniscule 2.5%. That number now stands at 0.5% — or, the odds of them winning the WCC tournament.

It’s one thing to know you have a terrible team, have it surprise you with a few fun wins, only to drop back into the abyss from which they came — and which you always knew they’d return.

It’s a whole other thing when you have a team that you hope is good, they show you they can be good, and rather than simply fall a bit short of your new, elevated expectations, they completely and totally implode to drop so precipitously that they end up below where they started.

That’s a different kind of disappointment all together.

This isn’t just about losing games, though. The reason WSU’s ranking is dropping so far, so fast, is because scoring margin (measured in points per possession) is a major factor in these systems, which are designed to be predictive.

And hoooooo boy … the way they are losing games does not flatter anyone associated with the program. Fans can tolerate some amount of losing; what they can’t tolerate is being non-competitive, and during this eight-of-nine stretch, WSU has lost by 20 or more an astounding five times, including each of the last three — two of which were at home — punctuated by the 30-point no-show against Santa Clara.¹

Torvik has a stat called “game score” which is basically just the adjusted efficiency margin for an individual game. It’s a handy little snapshot of how the team performed on a given night. A game score of 50 would mean you played like an average Division 1 team in that contest, 90+ would mean top 25, and under 30 would put you in the bottom quarter.

Here are WSU’s game scores, plotted:

First off, let’s address the 7 against Santa Clara. A 7 means you played like one of these guys:

Second, let’s note the other very obvious thing: The Cougars have gotten worse and worse and worse as the season has gone along, as illustrated by that massively negative trend line. The team is in a death spiral, and Riley can’t even stabilize them right now. There are no positive signs, there’s literally nothing to hang your hat on — only results that are worse than the ones before.

This is such a significant contrast to Riley’s predecessor. In every year at WSU — every single year — Kyle Smith’s teams finished the season higher in the predictive rankings than where they started. Only once did his team have a negative game score trend line of note²: 2022, when they recovered from a late-season swoon to make a run to the NIT semifinals.

One other stat of note to underscore just how bad this has gotten:

As a fan, you want to feel like you’re building toward something, even if there are losses. Getting worse as the season goes along to the point of being completely non-competitive kills your will to care anymore. That’s very, very bad.

The move out of the Pac-12 and subsequent departure of Smith and virtually all of the roster that made it to the second round of the NCAA tournament was pretty devastating, but playing in the WCC was supposed to provide a bit of a soft landing. So much for that!

We knew both Gonzaga and Saint Mary’s, who have dominated the conference for years, would be very tough. But we also had reason to believe that WSU could sit in or even atop the second tier with San Francisco and Santa Clara. As it turns out, we’re not only not in that tier, we can’t even really hang with the teams in that tier: In nine games against the top five teams in the standings, the Cougars are 1-8 with an average margin of minus-17.6.

Maybe its arrogant to look down our nose at this conference, but for real: Dropping down to the WCC and doing this is actually pretty embarrassing! At least Washington can point to having to play in the Big Ten for all its losses. WSU, meanwhile, can’t even even muster competitive performances in these glorified high school gyms up and down the west coast.

And if you’re tempted to say, “Well, we basically promoted EWU’s roster — what did you expect?”, I would simply point out two things: 1) Riley made a choice to do that; and 2) Our top four players last year³ came from Idaho (Big Sky), Sonoma State (Division 2), cancer treatment after having not played competitive hoops for two years, and Cochise College (junior college).

It was not unreasonable to expect this group to head to the WCC and be able to hang, even without Coward. Oregon State has gotten along just fine, doing basically what we had every right to expect — they’re in 5th at 20-9 overall and 10-6 in league. WSU, meanwhile, is (potentially) a last-second blocked shot against Pepperdine away from having already been locked into the 7th seed in the conference tournament with two games to play. As it is, they need to win their last two — against San Diego on Thursday and at Pepperdine on Saturday — and hope LMU loses its finale to Saint Mary’s in order to move up to 6th and advance a round in the WCC tournament bracket:

Ultimately, the responsibility for this falls at Riley’s feet. We got pretty spoiled by Smith, knowing that the team had a fighting chance on just about any given night, and that no-shows would be exceedingly rare. I think a significant portion of our fans are getting a bit of a new appreciation for just how much that actually matters.

What this all means for Riley’s long-term future, I’m not quite ready to say. Although I expect very little from these last few games, I’d like the complete picture of the season before making any bold declarations.

But at the moment, it looks very, very bad.