In regular-season finale against Oregon State, WSU to honor more than two dozen seniors as it reaches for bowl eligibility
PULLMAN – Back in August, when the heat was still sweltering and the sun was still beaming down on Washington State’s practice field, Josh Meredith opened up a little. Headed into this season, he was taking things a little personally, he said. He was tired of a certain perception that followed him around, that he was nothing more than a slot receiver who could find soft spots in zone defenses.
“I’ve never been the guy that was gonna run past people and then throw the ball,” Meredith said. “I was like, I know I can do that. So I just had to show them I could.”
Ahead of Meredith’s final game at Gesa Field, WSU’s regular-season finale against Oregon State at 3:30 p.m. Saturday, consider them proven wrong. As he prepares to wrap up a five-year career with the Cougars, the kind that has come to define everything right about this program, Meredith is averaging a career-best in yards per reception. He’s started in all 11 games, showing the type of workmanlike availability that has made him such an asset to this team, particularly in the last two years.
And perhaps most to Meredith’s point: He’s hauled in seven catches on 12 targets of 20-plus yards, by far a career-high. He’s made defenses pay for treating him with impudence, particularly deep down the field. On his way to his best season in his final season, replete with 47 catches for 607 yards and three scores, Meredith is set to exit WSU on the best of terms.
He deserves some plaudits for the career he’s authored, as do the 25 WSU seniors set to be honored before Saturday’s game, which the Cougars need to win to secure bowl eligibility. For WSU, it’s a strange senior day, though. Fourteen of those are playing their first and only season with the Cougars, some transfers from schools across the country, others coming to Pullman by way of South Dakota State, where coach Jimmy Rogers came from.
“It’s the veteran experience of just knowing, for one, those that came with me, the system,” Rogers said, “and helping bridge that gap from what wasn’t new for them, but new for many players, and then just the overall buy-in from those that stayed, their work ethic, their commitment to want to do it the right way as a team. I think it says a lot about them, and they’ve helped us significantly. We’re going to miss them, for sure. There’s some great players in this class, and we need to make sure that we honor them the right way.”
The list of Cougars seniors reads like a who’s who of the players who have engineered this season, the first under Rogers: offensive linemen Christian Hilborn and Brock Dieu, who have been stalwarts when healthy; quarterback Zevi Eckhaus, who has battled ups and downs to lead WSU to three wins after starting the season on the bench; linebacker Parker McKenna, a staple in the middle of his team’s defense; cornerbacks Jamorri Colson and Colby Humphrey, who excelled under thankless conditions; and then the safety trio of Tucker Large, Cale Reeder and Matt Durrance, who have turned a position of weakness into maybe the team’s best position this fall.
There are others, of course – right guard AJ Vaipulu, a transfer from New Mexico State; kick returner Leyton Smithson, a fourth-year Coug; defensive end Raam Stevenson, who is also wrapping up his fifth and final season at WSU; linebacker Caleb Francl, another SDSU transfer who has played his finest football in recent weeks – and they have all played key roles in giving the Cougs a chance to earn a trip to a bowl game in their swan songs in Pullman.
But Washington State still has a game to win. And the Cougars aren’t exactly in position to take this opponent lightly.
Oregon State, which made the hire of new head coach JaMarcus Shephard official with an announcement on Friday afternoon, earned a 10-7 win over WSU earlier this season in Corvallis. The Cougs’ defense played well enough to earn their team a win, but Eckhaus tossed a pair of interceptions, and their offense was held scoreless in the second half. WSU fans will recognize that pattern. It’s shown up in each of the Cougs’ past two road games, too, in which they’ve tallied a total of six points.
To earn a win on Saturday, WSU will have to turn that trend around. The good news for the Cougars is that it hasn’t been nearly as big a problem at Gesa Field, where they’re averaging nearly 27 points per game in their last three outings. The bad news for them: They won’t have the luxury of catching an opponent by surprise this time. In fact, if anyone is doing that, it could be OSU, which could start freshman QB Tristan Ti’a. If this matchup between WSU/OSU hasn’t turned into a rivalry already, it’s bordering on that territory.
To reach bowl eligibility, which the program has done in nine of the last 10 full seasons, the Cougars’ offense can’t slog through the lulls it did in their last contest against the Beavers. Eckhaus has thrown seven of his nine picks on the season in his last five games. That includes a pick-six in WSU’s loss to James Madison last weekend. Long a problem for WSU, turnovers can’t bite the group this weekend, lest the Cougs end the season on another skid – the kind they endured in recent seasons.
This might figure prominently in Saturday’s game: After WSU fell to JMU last weekend, Rogers said his players needed to “not reach for things outside their scope to do.” A few days later, he indicated that if his guys followed through, success would follow in turn.
“It could be an O-lineman taking his eyes through his gap, to clear his gap,” Rogers said, “to climb to a linebacker that’s out in front of him and stay on his track, to the wide receiver running the right route, inside adjusting to a defensive player starting to pull on the quarterback when that’s not his technical job. Some of it just comes down to a focus thing. I don’t think any of it is selfish. If I felt that way, they wouldn’t play. It’s just staying consistent with how they go about it and not reach to do other things inside of just their job.”
