Cougar QBs need some time

Fun with history:

On Labor Day weekend of 2000, Jason Gesser made his second start at quarterback for the Washington State Cougars. It was, by pretty much unanimous acclaim – and certainly by Gesser’s – a disaster. The offense never saw the end zone that day, and the Cougars lost by two touchdowns at home to a team that would fall to San Jose State the next week and finish 5-6. Gesser was intercepted twice and the Cougars totaled just 252 yards, their worst output since …

Ryan Leaf’s second start at quarterback, on the last day of August 1996.

Surely you can see where this is going.

Josh Swogger’s second start as a Cougar was even more frightful than either Gesser’s or Leaf’s, but the bottom line was the same – a Wazzu loss. It was also exacerbated by any number of factors – that the opponent was begging to be beaten, that it happened in front of more than 58,000 fans in the beautiful downtown Oz (including the inevitable rush-to-judgment I-5ers who will see only that game this year), and that backup quarterback Alex Brink came in and got a little something done, a fraction of it good.

This set off the most vigorous collective tongue-wag in Cougardom since they changed the brand of beer coming out of the fieldhouse taps during the pre-game function.

For his team’s sake and not the madding crowd’s, coach Bill Doba reaffirmed early this week that Swogger is indeed the starting quarterback and Brink the backup, and so it will stay.

Unless it changes.

This is simply the way it has to be. Coaches have to make choices and players must perform, and while issue was taken with the staff’s patience and timing in the Great Quarterback Shuttle Saga last Saturday, no one would presume to make them stand on 15 with every deal of blackjack, either.

Of course, while we’re talking starter and backup here, it can be argued just as persuasively – without intent to denigrate either candidate – that what the Cougars have is undeniably a Hobson’s choice.

They have kid quarterbacks – one a sophomore, the other a freshman – and if history tells us anything it’s that at WSU, that’s the back alley to Bowlville, at best.

The Cougars have had 18 winning seasons in the past 50 years – 10 of them in the last two decades – and in all but two of those seasons the opener-to-Apple Cup starter at quarterback has been a junior or a senior.

No surprise there. Experience matters, and it obviously matters most at quarterback. It just demonstrates the kind of odds Doba and Co. are up against in trying to make an unprecedented fourth straight trip to the postseason.

Because the rivals over the mountains have been such steady winners for decades, because Oregon has made such a habit of it lately and because Oregon State went for an eternity without hope, there isn’t much of a Northwest context for what the Cougars have gone through in this regard.

A sophomore from Olympia named Mel Melin quarterbacked the Cougars to a 6-4 record in 1959, right after the old Pacific Coast Conference went “poof” and the Cougs wound up with San Jose and Houston on the schedule instead of USC and UCLA.

Thirty five years would pass before another sophomore would steer the Cougs to a winning record – although whatever steering Chad Davis did was done mostly with the car in park.

Indeed, 1994 remains the only season in the last 50 during which the Cougars were dead last in the Pacific-10 (or its antecedents) in offense. Not even the dreadful 1969 and ‘70 teams were so impotent, so it can be concluded that the 8-4 record the Cougs put up in ‘94 was more in spite of young Chad than in his debt.

Hair-splitters will surely cite the Cougs of 1989 when freshman Aaron Garcia helped the Cougs to a 6-5 record. But senior Brad Gossen was 3-0 as a starter before an injury wiped out half his season, and maybe the Cougs go to a bowl if he’d been given back his job as soon as he was ready to return to work.

And, of course, the Cougars ended their forever bowl drought in 1981 with Clete Casper and sophomore Ricky Turner sharing time in Jim Walden’s rump-bone offense, though Casper was the regular starter.

In any event, it’s pretty well established – if the Cougars are winning with any regularity, there’s a seasoned senior at quarterback, or a junior with outsized ability (Timm Rosenbach, Drew Bledsoe, Mark Rypien, Leaf) who’s on the fast track to the National Football League.

Comparisons and expecations for either Swogger and Brink, then, are both irrelevant and unfair.

In either case, progress is going to be fitful. In either case, success is going to be problematic – particularly with an offensive line still trying to find itself, an AWOL running game and receivers who, to this point, have been even more erratic than the quarterbacks.

To a good many of us, Swogger is the quarterback with at least the most transparent upside – the size and the arm, as if quarterbacking is only that. Brink may well be one of those players who never backs down and simply wills himself into a job.

But that’s not going to be an overnight delivery, is it?

The fact is, the week after their dismal second starts, both Leaf and Gesser bounced back with terrific games – throwing for four touchdown passes apiece, no picks, no disasters. It didn’t hurt that in both cases the Cougars mustered an actual ground game – you know, when the quarterback hands off to a running back, and he dashes through gaps created by the offensive line, resulting in positive yardage?

Remember?

And after that, there would be other setbacks and other gains for Gesser and Leaf, as there are for any young quarterback.

What both had going for them was that their public hadn’t just been spoiled by three 10-win bowl seasons, and wasn’t demanding instant gratification.