The Monday After: Looking back, looking ahead

In today's newsletter ...

• Avoiding a repeat of 2023

• What We Liked: Family

• Who Impressed: John Mateer

• What Needs Work: Offensive Line consistency

• Up Next: Fresno State

Avoiding a repeat of 2023

With no game this past weekend, I hope you all got to enjoy a peaceful, no-stress weekend with family and/or friends, or that your actual responsibilities around your home finally got a little bit of attention. I went to a cross country meet at Chambers Bay, watched a bunch of soccer, and played some video games.

I also spent some time thinking about the Cougs, because I’m a sicko and that’s what I do.

The regular season is not quite 50% in the books — there are still seven games to go — but it certainly feels like we’re halfway home, thanks to the natural breaking point provided by the bye week. The Cougs are in a great position, sitting at 4-1 with an Apple Cup win and a victory over Texas Tech — and with their presumed toughest games behind them.

Which, as we learned last year, can be an extremely dangerous thing. It’s not quite a perfect comparison, considering that last year’s final seven games included Arizona (the Wildcats finished just outside the top 10), Oregon (the Ducks won the Fiesta Bowl and finished No. 6), and Washington (the Huskies made it to the CFP championship before getting stomped by Michigan). On paper, there’s not a team like that left on the 2024 schedule.

And yet, it’s hard not to see parallels. Both seasons featured emotional highs as the team soared to 4-0 before landing with a thud during the fifth game. Both of those losses came after some cracks showed through the week before; both came on the road; both featured pretty epic fourth-quarter meltdowns.

I don’t know what Jake Dickert has to do to make sure this season is different, but you can bet he’s devoted a ton of time to dissecting what went wrong 12 months ago and how not to repeat it this year. What was so strange about last season is that it was hard to pinpoint any one, singular, particular thing that doomed them. We can agree the offense, in general, just wasn’t good enough. But while they lost low scoring games, they also lost high scoring games and medium scoring games. Neither the offense or defense were good enough, but then the defense came around and the offense got worse, and then the kicker started missing kicks, and then the offense came around but the defense fell apart …

Which left us grasping for explanations like “they realized they weren’t going to play their way into a major conference and it deflated the entire team” and “clearly the players are distracted by all the NIL recruiters who are reaching out with transfer opportunities.” I have no idea if either of those things were actually true; I usually try to avoid playing armchair psychologist, but I just couldn’t come up with anything better, so those are the things I said and wrote.

At the very least, I think it’s fair to assume that last season’s team was dreaming big after getting to 4-0 with a win over Wisconsin and rising to a No. 13 ranking. I mean, we all did, so I’m sure they did too. The dream of winning the final Pac-12 title was reduced to a smolder in two weeks with consecutive losses to UCLA and Arizona, and it was extinguished completely the next week at in Eugene.

Whatever this team is dreaming of, those dreams are still very much alive, even in the wake of the loss to Boise State (which is now up to No. 17 in the AP poll after ripping Utah State). ESPN gives WSU a 1-in-5 chance of winning out and a 15% chance of making the CFP. Those two numbers are obviously very much tied together, and we can infer from the small delta between them that if we finish on 11-1, we’re very likely going to be ranked in the top 11 and selected for the playoff.¹ That’s a hell of a carrot.

Of course, the 2023 team still had a hell of a carrot after losing to the Bruins, and they got steamrolled by an Arizona team looking for blood the next week at home.

Perhaps it makes a difference that this bye week comes after a loss and not after ascending into the top 15 — there’s no joy in sniffing your own farts for a couple of weeks when you just got run over by the best player in the country and took a plane ride home wearing a three-TD ass kicking. While everyone almost always says that a bye week “comes at a perfect time,” I do think that’s true for these guys. It’s a perfect time to reset by digesting a bad loss that ought not to sit right, to do some self-scouting, and to make the necessary adjustments for this second “half.” Reinforcements also are on the way in the form of Carlos Hernandez (penciled in before the season as the No. 2 receiver) and Jamorri Colson (penciled in before the season as a starter at corner), both of whom are expected to return this week.

That said, my biggest fear is that the players end up looking at the remaining schedule and these probabilities the same way we do — that they “should” win all seven of these games. Dickert continues to preach a “one-game championship” mentality, but the roster is still filled with guys who were recruited to play in the Pac-12 against top-level competition, and it would be natural if they didn’t view the remaining opponents as “peers,” particularly after an opening stretch that wasn’t demonstrably different in quality than the opening five games of any other season. The reality of a Mountain West schedule (plus Oregon State) will set in at some point. Additionally, only three of the remaining seven games are at home, and those are generally considered to be against the worst teams of the bunch. Road games are rarely easy, even when you’re “better” than the home team.

Dickert is still a young coach, and I’m hopeful he figured out a thing or two from last season’s debacle. I think we’ll learn a lot this weekend. Beat Fresno State away from home — and do it convincingly — and we can all exhale and put last season behind us for good.

With that, let’s reflect on some stuff from the first five games.

What We Liked: Family

When we talk about what might be different about this edition of the Cougs vs. last year, I can’t help but feel like there’s a different vibe around this squad, one that will hopefully keep them on track.