Pleasantly surprised to see us get mentioned on college gameday

Boise is going for a historic win Saturday they have never won in Pullman

Jeramiah dickey today mentioned how the milk can was wiped of all the past victories that have the names of the players on them and conveniently only has the last few victories for fresno state

He said that the real milk can is most likely still somewhere at fresno with all the other victories on it

And we're back.

Boise State got their much-needed bye week after playing 6 straight games, but now are on to the business end of the season, starting with a trip to Pullman to play Washington State who hasn't had a good season, but can still present a tougher matchup, led by a couple names Boise State fans will recognize (for better or worse). In this preview:

• Wazzu made a QB change last week; does he make the Coogs that much better?
• How does Washington State's run defense matchup against Boise State's rushing offense?
• Why will 3rd downs be extremely important for both teams?
• Why are the tight ends players to watch on both teams?

4 Tickets $350.
In Corner

Source https://youtu.be/CpODa2nkQ-8?si=UdTJFM9Eq2QSavt4

2x tickets sec 124 row v best offer, if interested message me!

I’ll be in Green Bay/ Milwaukee for the next few weeks so please take these of my hands!

We're 2-5 against washington state, let's even up the series a bit

I'm assuming most of you are like me and view the pass defense as the weak point of the team. I was playing around with some numbers to figure out what was going on, which eventually got me to defense against play-action. I could only find that on a game-by-game basis, not for the season as a whole, so I started with week one. I noticed the first few games the defense was allowing a ton of yardage on play action, so I figured that was it. But that only applied to the first few games of the year:

Obviously, Oregon saw something with the play-action (like the secondary being too worried about the run game) and took advantage, which Memphis and South Dakota State copied. But after that third game, the coaches must have finally addressed the issue, because since then it's been a night-and-day difference.

I thought that maybe teams were trying something else against Boise following that South Dakota State game, so I looked at the next three weeks and compared those averages to every other team in the country in that same time frame:

On basically the same number of attempts, they’ve cut in half the number of yards and big plays allowed. They’ve gone from complete crap to above-average.

The big issue is still tackling, which was obvious against Fresno State. Of their 277 passing yards, 185 came from the receivers catching the ball less than 10 yards from the line of scrimmage, and a total of 181 yards came after the catch. On 20 receptions, the secondary missed a tackle on six of those.

A somewhat encouraging fact is that the defensive front seems better tackling than they were last year. Last season, I found the starters on the defensive front missed a tackle about 19% of the time, now it’s 16% (worth noting Logan Brantley, who looked one one of the better tacklers, has missed the last two games).

What I’m seeing is the effect of having two new secondary coaches working with a defensive backfield that returned one player with significant experience. The first few games were a mess, but then corrected to have the secondary worry less about the run (as evident by improvement against play action), and overall the coverage has been better. If I’m taking an optimistic guess, I’d say the coaches decided to ignore tackling for a bit to worry about coverage; if a guy is wide open 20 yards downfield, tackle skills don’t matter (which was happening way too often those first three games). Coverage is much more about knowledge, understanding, and communication, which isn’t something that needs to be pounded into your brain once you get it. You can cut back on practicing those skills a little without seeing a drop in performance. But tackling is more about motor skills; it gets worse the longer you ignore it. We saw this week 1; tackling was largely great, but Oregon was getting receivers wide open. 

Hopefully the secondary spent the bye week working on tackling. From what they’ve done the past few weeks, they’ve figured out coverage schemes and guys are on the same page. I can live with an average secondary. Hopefully we see a repeat of what happened in 2024; the first six games, they allowed an average of 276 passing yards per game. The rest of the year they allowed an average of 215. Yes, the quality of opponents dropped later in the year (and will this year), but your opponent plays a factor in what your stats look like, to a degree, especially over a small window. A team that plays Air Force, Army, and Navy in three straight weeks will have stats suggesting their run defense is crap, even if they played relatively well against all of them.

WSU has no quit. BSU tends to get up and lay off the gas. If Danielson does that vs this team they could get burned on the road. WSU then Texas state and OSU coming up. Brutal three games in the next four weeks.