Yup.
Here's a quote from the Coug's board:
"hate looking at it this way, but...
Both of our scores come from ISU mistakes. First was the Purdy pick that gave us the short field. Second was extended by the targeting call. Third helped by back to back big penalties. ISU cleans that up, and we’re not getting in scoring position.
Yep. I think it's fairly obvious if you watched that game without bias, let's say rooting for either team as a big fan. WSU played a good first half, but ISU played an uncharacteristically bad first half at the same time giving up 21 points. In the second half, WSU only scored 7 points, and at game's end that's 10 points under their average. ISU also outgained WSU on offense by nearly 200 yards which says a lot for such a "vaunted" offense that WSU has. ISU definitely wins this game at least 6 or 7 times out of 10. There is no question in my mind about this.
I don't take the OP's comments as **** talking. They seem like a good sports for the most part. WIth that being said, their comment about the future is rather misguided and maybe slightly laughable to me. It's great they are optimistic, and I wish WSU the best, but we'll see what happens. Talking about the future in such absolute terms is so misguided to me with things like college sports where you only have individual players for a small set period of years maximum.
Since 2015, WSU has been pretty good or very good. A big part of the success though is their offense. The defense is interesting, but also since then has given up big pointage to good, ranked opponents. Between 2015 and 2018, WSU's opponents scored an average of 25.8 points per game on them. There has been some improvement as in 2015, opponents scored 27.7 points per game on them and in 2018 scored 23.3 points per game on them. By contrast, ISU's defense gave up an average of 22.9 points per game this year, and 20.9 points per game last year.
The good news for WSU is that they have a good WR core who will mostly be back next year as well as the RB. The thing is that WSU since 2015, when good, have been led by good QBs. Between 2015 and 2017, they were led by Luke Falk who is in the NFL now (Titans and Dolphins in his rookie year). This year was unexpected with Minshew and he was really good this year for them. Next year maybe there will be a good year by someone like Anthony Gordon who did well in JUCO. You never know and definitely possible with Mike Leach's track record. Will he do well right away or take some time? As ISU fans, we know how much a good QB can make or break the team. I'm talking about the difference between good and great or even better. Zeb Noland for example I think is a good QB, but he had a tough time getting wins. Brock Purdy at times is a great QB and got the best out of people. Is a guy like Anthony Gordon going to be a Zeb Noland or a Brock Purdy?
The key will be their offense because they do lose some key players on D next year. They have some good players coming back for sure, but they're also losing their leading tackler (Pelluer), a few D-backs, a few of the secondary, etc. Also losing a potential NFL talent in the O-Line at LT.
For ISU, Brock Purdy as a freshman went 7-1 against the Big 12 and nearly beat WSU. Purdy, as a freshman, put up the 2nd most amount of passing yards against WSU defense all year - and the #1 who was the QB from Stanford, only outpassed him by 8 yards. ISU loses some good DB talent, but mostly everyone else is back. The unknowns are obviously David Montgomery and Hakeem Butler - they are juniors so could return but they have NFL talent, so who knows yet. Nwangu though averaged 5.5 yards per carry, and is the fastest guy on the team. He might not break tackles like Montgomery but he could be a more standard good RB. At WR, Matthew Eaton is a senior, but pretty much everyone else is back and some like Milton have some very good talent.
Point is that it's not as easy to say who would win in the future. There's too many factors and saying one way or another in an absolute manner is kind of laughable. I wish WSU luck though and it would be interesting to play every year, but due to a few things, doubtful that would happen at least as long as we're playing Iowa every year.
