The Monday After: It's time for Arbuckle to figure it out

In today's newsletter ...

• Off The Top: Just not good enough offensively

• What We Liked: Defense

• Who Impressed: Ethan O’Connor

• What Needs Work: FS1’s cheap-ass remote broadcasts

• Up Next: Hawaii for Homecoming!

Off The Top: Just not good enough offensively

When a fanbase experiences a season that goes off the rails in the way that last season did for WSU, I think you sort of end up on high alert for anything at all that might portend a similar demise in the subsequent season. So when the Cougars struggled as mightily as they did to score points on Saturday against Fresno State — saved, thank goodness, by a pick six from Ethan O’Connor — a sort of panic set in pretty quickly with me.

It’s probably not reasonable to freak out after a win. It’s probably illogical to draw such parallels between two distinctly different seasons featuring two distinctly different teams.

I don’t care. Don’t talk to me about reason. None of that matters.

We can’t do this again.

I actually found myself getting a little viscerally angry at the performance of the offense on Saturday, which — to my mind — really had no excuse for its prolonged stretches of impotence. No matter what the broadcast said, Fresno State’s defense is actually not good, and we certainly should not have had as much difficulty as we did in that game. The Bulldogs were fresh off giving up 45 offensive points to UNLV at an eye-popping 8.04 yards per play clip. The Rebels had open guys running all over the field, all day.

The Cougars, meanwhile, did not have open guys running all over the field. Everything seemed hard: Their yards per play was a season-low 4.28, which is fewer than New Mexico, Sacramento State, and Michigan managed against the Bulldogs. Read that sentence again, if you need to. WSU has a lot more offensive talent than at least two of those teams, and WSU certainly has a better QB than Michigan. And if not for O’Connor and a pair of missed field goals (plus some extremely ill-timed penalties) by Fresno State, we’d be sitting here staring at yet another loss in the last two seasons due almost entirely to a feckless offense.

That’s why I’m sounding the alarm. Because unless something changes, this team is absolutely going to lose a game it should not.

Offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle has been in charge for 18 games, and in that time, his unit has been at or under 5.0 yards per play seven times. Those are “stinkers,” and if we divide them by the total number of games, we get a very real stat that I totally did not just make up right now — Stinker Rate: 39%. For context, Mike Leach only went at or below 5.0 six times in his last three years combined — a stretch of 39 games. That’s a Stinker Rate of 15%.³  

Maybe it’s not fair to compare Arbuckle to one of the great offensive minds in football history, and maybe we’re still in the “small sample” portion of this. But there’s a standard around here for offense, and the Stinkers have appeared far too frequently already. Perhaps even more concerning is that the Stinkers also appear to be part of larger trends — in the wrong direction. Here are Arbuckle’s two seasons stacked on each other; the dashed line is a trend line for yards per play across each season: