Washington State Gameday Huddle: UNLV Rebels

Welcome back to an early gameday Coug Nation! Been a while since we played on a Friday, but there’s nothing that would start the weekend off right like a Cougar win today. This week we come into a game as a 1 touchdown favorite in a game that we should win by 30 points. It’s true, as I was talking to my brother tonight about it, we agreed that UNLV is at their breaking point. There spirit is really just dangling there and all we have to do is run over and punch it in the face. 1 punch and it’s going to be over. Of course as we all know we have a tendency to allow teams back into games that have no business being there, but let’s just face the fact that the Rebels don’t have the spirit of our last opponent.

It is pretty simple. It’s time to show improvement tonight. It’s time to show the nation what’s going down in Pullman and it’s time to show ourselves that we deserve to be a player in the conference right now!  Leach is demanding more from his players, he’s demanding perfection. He’s demanding that his players stop with the excuses and just execute. He’s demanding that WSU stops feeling sorry for itself whenever something adverse happens to it and that they fight back and do something about it. It’s refreshing to hear him in a press conference, especially when he actually talks all football. There’s no satisfaction. After all “This isn’t really the satisfaction business”, he says. It’s all about moving forward and doing better next week. And here we are again.

UNLV is on the brink of total collapse and it’s the Cougs’ job to just help them do it. I think the great thing about today is that we don’t have to go out and play great football to win this game. We could do that and it would be great to see, but we just have to make the easy play and in Leach’s words “do the routine, consistently”. We have to avoid the turnover that would set them up in a spot to compete in the game. We have to avoid the holding penalty that has taken 4 touchdowns (and almost a 5th and 4 of those plays coming from Marquess) off of the board. We have to avoid a blown coverage that allows a 93 yard touchdown when we’re about to put the game away early. We have to avoid worrying about who is in the game and for what reason, and just play the game! Do your job and let others worry about doing their job. We have the players at every position to dominate a game like this without really having to do anything spectacular, so let’s do it.

Go Cougs!