At one point this season, probably in early October just before the Cougars blew a game at UCLA, it looked like the Apple Cup might carry some added intrigue for once.
Heck, it still might have if the Cougars had been able to beat Utah in a Pullman snowstorm last Saturday. That would have made the Apple Cup mean something more than a week of speculation about whether the Huskies should fire defensive coordinator Nick Holt and whether the Cougars should replace their excuse-making coach, Paul Wulff.
The Huskies apparently aren’t going to dump Holt after this game, but the Cougars need to get rid of Wulff.
Any time a coach says it’s “progress” to be expected to win after losing 42-21 to a one-win team … any time a coach says a program cannot be built back up in four years … and any time a coach says just being in the hunt for a bowl game is enough … you know you have the wrong coach.
Wulff has done nothing but make excuses and talk about how much more time he needs to make the Cougars competitive again. Well, that’s not how it works. His time is up.
If the Cougars lose to the Huskies, they will finish with four wins – just two more than they had in Wulff’s first season in 2008. That hardly qualifies as progress.
Wulff talks about all of the young talent he has recruited, but if the team is so talented, why is it losing? Give you one guess. Wulff’s first recruits are now seniors and redshirt juniors. He has had time to build this program. These are his guys.
All you need to get into a bowl in this watered-down age of mediocrity is a .500 record, and that includes a waiver for a win against a lower-division foe. It’s a ridiculously low standard driven by money, not by performance.
And yet Wulff hasn’t even been able to meet that meager mark in four years.
Yeah, losing quarterback Jeff Tuel in the first game this season was a major blow. And, who knows? Maybe athletic director Bill Moos will give Wulff a pass for that reason and let him come back for the final year of his contract under a win-or-else mandate.
But he shouldn’t. Wulff hasn’t done anything to prove he deserves to come back. A good coach overcomes injuries and wins some games he should not. Other than a win at OSU last year and the nice victory against a decent ASU team a couple of weeks ago with freshman Connor Halliday pulling the trigger, Wulff has not made his team any better.
Instead, the Cougars have lost games they should have won. They were underdogs at San Diego State, but they led by 10 in the third quarter and ended up giving the game away on three fourth-quarter turnovers by Marshall Lobbestael. Yeah, they Coug’d It.
They had to have a near miracle to come back and beat a bad Colorado team in the final minute. Then they blew tons of chances at UCLA and coughed up another game they should have had.
Then there was the debacle in Seattle against Oregon State, a blowout loss at Cal in which the Cougars seemed completely disinterested and the latest loss, in overtime to Utah in the elements the Cougars once dominated in.
The Cougars have lost six out of seven games and are the third-worst team in the Pac-12. They’re still not competitive against Stanford and Oregon (good thing they didn’t have to play USC, which might be the best team in the conference).
Are the Cougs better than they were when Wulff took over in 2008? Sure, by a slim margin. But not by enough.
Wulff’s situation reminds me a lot of Jim Mora’s one year in charge of the Seahawks in 2009. I’m never in favor of axing a guy after one year, but Mora’s team regressed so badly in December that by the end it seemed like there was no hope for improvement even if Mora came back.
Wulff has had four years, and his team is hardly any better. If the Cougars had not lost to other bad teams as much as they have — if they had beaten UCLA, Oregon State and Utah – he would have a strong case for staying.
But he has really made this Apple Cup pretty blasé. It is not even as intriguing as the 2008 game, when both teams were winless in the Pac-10 coming in (and the Huskies ended up 0-12 after an ugly overtime Cup).
There’s nothing riding on this game – not even Wulff’s job – because even if the Cougars win, it’s time for Wulff to go.
Original Story:
http://outsidethepressbox.com/?p=4446
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November 26, 2011
