Washington State Football: 2012 Season Reflections, BYU Cougars

Aug 30, 2012; Provo, UT, USA; Washington State Cougars nose tackle Kalafitoni Pole (98) sits on the sidelines during the third quarter against the Brigham Young Cougars at Lavell Edwards Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jake Roth-US PRESSWIRE

Now that the season is over, I’d like to take a look at the year in review, on a week by week basis of what our Cougs accomplished (or failed to accomplish). These are more secondary thoughts than anything, not recapping the games but more my thoughts as a fan looking back.

In the first week I was full of major anticipation, as were most Coug fans coming into the season. Of course we were still taking in the biggest hire in school history with Mike Leach, even though that came directly on the heels of the firing of Paul Wulff, who was and always will be, one of our own. Bill Moos saw a different direction though and the hire created immediate and overwhelming enthusiasm toward the upcoming 2012 season.

Then we ran into BYU. We know now that we probably made BYU look better than they ended up being, and we certainly came out of that game wondering about the rest of our season. Don’t get me wrong, there was still a lot of optimism, but heck we didn’t even score a legitimate touchdown in the game. Suddenly a realization began to set in that it might take some time. But yeah, BYU just torched us on national television and it was a real smack in the face. It was kind of the beginning of a circus in Pullman, surrounding Leach and his comments, along with players that just seemed to care less about changing the culture and more about preserving it.

As fans we chalked it up to a young ball club, we moved on, but there was one aspect of the game that was abundantly clear: This WSU club was not a team that would, or could handle adversity very well. We’ve seen it for several seasons now and new coach or no, the team hadn’t changed at all. Marquess Wilson hung his head and then everybody else joined him, drawing the ire of Mike Leach in the following press conferences. BYU was tougher in every category and manifested our weakest points, on the field physically and on the field mentally. This was only the beginning, of course, and looking back it was worse than we saw it for.