Levels of competition

I hope that some of you had a chance to watch either the UW-UO Duck game or the WSU-Stanford game last weekend. I got to watch most of the WSU game and heard updates of the UW game.

I would hope that the Cougs and Huskies might look back on the previous week when the Huskies played Stanford and the Cougs played Oregon. It seems to me that the Washington schools helped their rivals by smacking around those teams making things a lot easier this past weekend.

I can’t imagine that either Stanford or Oregon came away with the losses they incurred and really felt very good about themselves. I can imagine they were wondering how much worse they could play.

Last Saturday Washington rid themselves of 12 years of Oregon beat downs by annihilating the Ducks 70-21. This was a week after the Cougs smacked the Ducks around 51-33. The only good thing for Oregon is that they have this week off.

Also last Saturday, the Cougars destroyed Stanford by a score of 42-16 and it probably wasn’t that close. After three big wins to start the season the Cardinals lost 44-6 to the Huskies and then to WSU last Saturday. What goes around comes around as they say and the Ducks and Cardinals are certainly in the way of the coming around. If you are a fan of either of these two teams I’m sure you are hurting and trying to figure out what has gone wrong.

A lot of fans in the state of Washington are happy to see that these teams have fallen on hard times. It is the nature of the beast sometimes. You know, all good things must come to an end at least for a while.

Speaking of the WSU game on Saturday night, I think I know why some fans mute the audio of the televised broadcast and listen to the radio. The problem with doing that is sometimes there is a delay on the TV broadcast and the next play is run on the radio before the play is run on TV, which can be confusing.

Listening to the TV broadcast can be frustrating when the announcers, who think they know everything about the two teams playing in the game, start rambling about things in general.

For instance, as the Cougars were beating up on Stanford the color analyst started talking about the unfortunate start to the WSU season. The guy started mentioning the losses to Eastern Washington and Boise State as if the two teams weren’t worthy of being on the same turf as the Cougars let alone beating WSU.

Someone must have reminded the guy that Boise State is still undefeated so he stopped bringing up that loss. But he kept bringing up the Eastern game as being such a difficult loss.

Obviously the guy didn’t research the fact that EWU is 5-1 with its only loss being at North Dakota State in overtime with All-American Cooper Kupp unable to play in the second half of that game.

By the way, The Bison beat the Iowa Hawkeyes the following week in Iowa City.

Eastern Washington and North Dakota State are big time football programs that recruit very well and often pick up talent that is overlooked by FBS programs. Great coaches develop many of these players.

These coaches aren’t making huge paychecks and a lot of the head coaches are coaching players and not just overseeing the other coaches. So when I see an FCS school ‘upset’ an FBS team I know how difficult it is. I would love to see the FBS school travel to Fargo and play NDS on their home turf even though the Bison have done very well on the road.

The EWU coaching staff prepares their team very well and they certainly aren’t looking at the Pac-12 school as merely a paycheck game, The Eagles expect to win that game and win or lose the opponent knows it was in a real dog fight.

I hope the next announcer that talks about the WSU loss to Eastern as a negative will at least do a little research and realize that the Eagles are still winning and having a great season and the spring board was the victory in Pullman.

There are very few teams around the country that have played as difficult of an opening month of football that Eastern played. But that high level of competition has created a lot of confidence for the football team in Cheney.

The Eagles have a well-deserved bye this week and we fans will be taking a deep breath and rejoice in the great start to the 2016 season.