I labeled last week’s game against UCLA a must-win, and thankfully the team read my post and took care of business 🙂
I’m going to label this weeks game a must win as well. Here’s why:
Looking ahead, we have play at #12 Washington next week. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we’re not going to win that game. We might even get blown out. We’ve won at Washington before and we’ll win there again at some point, but it won’t be this season. We haven’t established the consistency needed to pull off a win like that and frankly we just don’t have the horses for it.
That leads up to the following week, where we have Colorado at home. Although CO has been playing much better of late (they had ASU on the ropes at Tempe until a late collapse), they are likely to lose their game this week at USC. They then have TWO weeks to prepare for their game against us (thanks Larry). CO will be fresh and extremely motivated to that final win against us for bowl eligibility. Couple this with the fact that (1) the game will be Senior Day and we tend to suck on Senior Day. Not sure if it’s the pressure of what, but we always seem to play flat in our final home game and the results show that. And (2) we seem to struggle with CO, even in years when they are awful. This year, they are right about on our same level. We’ll be coming off a loss (possibly a crushing loss), and the combination of all of these factors has me not liking the CO matchup this year, ESPECIALLY if we lose this weekend.
With the schedule that awaits, I’ll go ahead and say it: if we don’t win this weekend, we lose out and finish at 5-7. That would officially make it a disappointing season. It will signify a step backward in what Whitt has been building.
On the flip side, if we can somehow muster up a win against WSU, it changes everything. With the pressure to get the coveted 6th win off our back, we can play more loose for our final two games. I think we’d put up a better performance against WA, and should also beat CO.
Sat is an extremely important game. I hope Whitt game preps this one like crazy. Throw the whole kitchen sink at WSU like we did to Oregon a few years ago. This will be a tough game. WSU is a very solid team, but they are beatable. Cal managed to crack their code, and we need to replicate what they did as much as possible. We need some heroes / playmakers to step up and score points on offense, defense, and special teams. We need Moss to run like a mad man. We need Hansen to deliver a pick 6. We need Boobie Hobbs take a punt to the house. The fans need to bring their A game as well.
We put ourselves in a bad situation by not showing up against Stanford, ASU, and Oregon. Now, we have to find a way to win on Saturday.
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