Gameday Guide: WSU vs. Hawaii

In today's newsletter ...

• A prime chance to roll

• Critical Info

• Gamblin’

• Injury Impact

  • WSU

  • Hawai'i

• Key matchups

  • WSU’s offensive line vs. Hawai'i’s defensive line

  • WSU’s DBs vs. explosive plays

• What I’ll be watching for

  • How committed, actually, are we to handing off the …

• What you can watch for: Gameday Bingo!

• Other games of interest

A prime chance to roll

It’s been a calendar month since WSU last played in Pullman, so it will surely feel great for the Cougars to play in front of their home crowd once again after a couple of road grinders at Boise State and Fresno State.

And, like last time, it’s against an opponent the Cougs are expected to handle with relative ease. We know how that turned out, though — an ulcer-inducing 54-52, come-from-behind, overtime victory against San Jose State. If it’s of any comfort, the various rating systems believe Hawai'i is much, much worse than the Spartans; in fact, one of my favorite sites — thepredictiontracker.com, which aggregates predictive models — pegs the Cougs as roughly three touchdowns better and winning this matchup about 90% of the time. That’s the biggest gap since the season opener against Portland State.

The games aren’t played on paper, yadda yadda yadda, but here’s one more for you: The Rainbow Warriors have won just one (1) game on the mainland since 2021, going 1-13. They have losses this year to Sam Houston State and San Diego State. You know how much everyone is making about the new Big Ten schools having to travel east across three time zones to play some of the road games? The Rainbow Warriors have to do that every time they leave the island, and this week they’re going to be kicking off at 9:30 a.m. on their body clocks — same as a certain team in purple that got stomped out by Iowa last weekend.¹

Put it all together, and this ought to be a prime “get right” weekend for the Cougars. The defense got its act back together against Fresno State, and Hawai'i has struggled mightily to score points both home and away. But the offense needs to start re-delivering on the promise it showed in the first couple of games.

Critical Info

• Game time: 12:30 p.m. PT

• Location: Back Home

• Weather forecast at kickoff: 60 degrees, partly cloudy, slight breeze with gusts up to 15 mph 

• How to watch: The CW

• How to listen: WSUCougars.com

• Live stats: StatBroadcast 

Gamblin’

Consensus via VegasInsider.com as of Saturday morning.

Trends: WSU is 4-2 against the spread; Hawai'i is 2-3-1. The Rainbow Warriors have gone under the number in five of six games. Between the two of them, they’ve gone under the number in 4 of 12 games combined.

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