Back when Washington State was coming off back-to-back blowout losses to North Texas (59-10) and Washington (59-24), Virginia’s game with the Cougars in Week 8 was looking like a cakewalk.
That was before Wazzu took #4 Ole Miss to the brink in a 24-21 loss on Saturday.
“We all read our press clippings about being #4, but we looked like we were #84 today,” Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin said after his team’s great escape.
“Maybe we will look back and say this was good for us, but it doesn’t feel too good today,” Kiffin said.
Washington State (3-3), in their second and final season as one of two members of the remnants of the Pac-12, is having to play basically whoever has an open date just to get to 12 games.
To that point: the cross-country trip to Charlottesville is the first of two visits the Cougars will make to the Commonwealth this season – Wazzu is making a stop on its world tour on Nov. 22 at JMU.
They went to North Texas, went to Colorado State.
The program is also doing a rare in-season home-and-home with the other Pac-12 leftover, Oregon State, on Nov. 1 and Nov. 29.
Fortunately for both, the Pac-12 will grow back out to eight football members, and nine for basketball, next summer.
I’ll be honest here – I’m a little surprised to see Virginia listed as an early 16.5-point favorite, per odds from CBS Sports, given how good Washington State looked yesterday.
The Cougars held Ole Miss nearly 100 yards under the Rebels’ season average on offense, and the Wazzu D is giving up an average of 348.3 yards per game this season, which is in the Top 50 nationally.
The issue in the ugly losses to North Texas and Washington: turnovers – five in the loss to North Texas, three in the loss to Washington.
That’s gotten cleaned up in their last two, a 20-3 win over Colorado State, and the narrow loss to Ole Miss – no turnovers in either one.
Grad senior Zevi Eckhaus, who transferred to Wazzu ahead of the 2024 season after throwing for 8,470 yards and 75 TDs in three seasons at Bryant, an FCS program, has solidified himself as the QB1, passing for 686 yards and six TDs in three starts since taking over on Sept. 20.
The Cougs led for the bulk of the first three quarters on Saturday in Oxford, and made it interesting at the end.
“Nobody can question our effort. I’m proud of that effort,” said first-year head coach Jimmy Rogers, who was 27-3 with an FCS national title in his brief two-season run at South Dakota State.
“Yeah, like I said, there’s no moral victories. You win or you lose in competitive sports, and nobody will care in a week how well we played. So, we lost, and that’s a little bit of a sick feeling.”
Which is to say, they’re hungry.
The team has to fly back and forth across the continent, which is a tremendous disadvantage, but even with that as a factor, don’t overlook these guys.
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Chris Graham
