If the Washington State football team resembles any imagery that head coach Mike Leach uses to describe it, the Bears won’t have any trouble in their Saturday night contest in Pullman, Wash.
“Some of (the seniors) have been great, and some of them have been very poor,” Leach said. “Some of them have had kind of this zombie-like, go through the motions, everything is like how it’s always been, that’s how it’ll always be.
“Some of them quite honestly have an empty-corpse quality. That’s not pleasant to say or pleasant to think about, but that’s a fact.”
The Cougars (2-4, 0-3 in the Pac-12) are about as bad as any team in Division I. Early season wins against FCS Eastern Washington and 1-5 UNLV superficially boosted their overall record.
But every game in which Washington State faced decent competition has been an unmitigated disaster.
The team even fell to butt-of-all-jokes Colorado, a squad that couldn’t beat two FCS teams to start its season and then was blown out by an average Fresno State team.
Despite starting likely NFL first-round pick Marquess Wilson at receiver, the offense struggles to score points against quality defenses. Against both BYU and Oregon, the Cougars failed to score a single touchdown.
Preseason prognosticators deemed quarterback play as the supposed strength of Washington State’s offense. Instead, sophomore Connor Halliday has proved to be the most inconsistent facet of the offensive attack.
Halliday completes just 53.6 percent of his passes, ranking last among Pac-12 quarterbacks. His nine touchdowns to nine interceptions ratio also sits at the bottom of the pack.
The defensive strength of Cal (2-4, 1-1) clearly lies in its pass defense, creating further problems for Halliday. Outside linebacker Chris McCain is a relentless pass-rushing threat, while cornerbacks Steve Williams and Marc Anthony both serve as reliable veteran presences in the secondary. Sophomore safety Avery Sebastian displays a knack for covering the field sideline-to-sideline.
With the Bears’ defense likely to stifle the Cougars’ impotent passing attack, Leach figures to center his offensive strategy around the run game.
Unfortunately for Leach, the Cougars won’t be working with much there. Their 41.3 rushing yards per game rank second-to-last in all of Division I football.
Washington State’s best shot at taking down a Cal squad fresh off a momentum-swinging blowout of UCLA will be in attempting to turn this contest into a good old-fashioned defensive slugfest.
Cal’s offense might be up for the challenge. The quality of quarterback Zach Maynard’s performances wavers inconsistently. Maynard will put up games like last week’s UCLA victory or Ohio State’s challenge, both instances in which his decision-making is decisive and his throws are accurate.
But Maynard is also prone to performances like his 9-for-28 stinkbomb against Arizona State, in which his priority seemed to be peering at the offensive line before another defensive lineman was going to break through for another sack.
If the former Maynard comes to play against Washington State, the Cougars are effectively doomed. Their pass defense has not been great thus far; they’ve allowed 302.8 yards per game, good for 11th in the conference.
A strong start from Maynard will hand off the bulk of the offense to the Bears’ running attack. C.J. Anderson, Isi Sofele and Brendon Bigelow form a three-headed monster capable of maintaining a lead and eating up clock if Cal can grab an early lead.
“I have to be more consistent,” Maynard said. “Being the quarterback, I have to get better each week, game after game.”
But Maynard’s consistency may be irrelevant if the zombie Cougars can’t survive their internal apocalypse.
Michael Rosen covers football. Contact him at [email protected]
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