PULLMAN — It was all right there.
A chance to head to overtime. A chance to keep alive an upset bid against the No. 18 team in the nation. A chance to turn a tough season around.
It was all right there.
But, with 12 seconds left, Romeen Abdollmohammadi’s 46-yard field goal hooked slowly, inexorably, wide left. And for the fourth time in six games this year, Washington State’s football team had lost, this time 23-20 to Arizona State before a homecoming crowd of 35,117 at Martin Stadium.
“It looked like it was going right, but the wind was going that direction — it was in my face, I know — and I couldn’t see if it was one foot, two feet (wide),” Cougar head coach Bill Doba said of the try toward the east end of the stadium. “But that didn’t lose the game. There were a number of plays throughout that cost us the ball game.”
The deciding points, which came on a 37-yard field goal by redshirt freshman Thomas Weber with 50 seconds to play, capped a 45-yard Arizona State (6-0 overall, 3-0 Pac-10) drive. All but 11 of those yards came via the ground.
The Cougars (2-4, 0-3) had tied the game at 20 just three minutes earlier, using an 18-play, 77-yard drive culminated by Abdollmohammadi’s 38-yard field goal, his second of the game. During the drive, WSU overcame 20 yards worth of penalties, part of a season-high 11 for 90 yards.
As Cougars quarterback Alex Brink put it, “We shot ourselves in the foot too often.”
One was a miscommunication between Brink and Michael Bumpus — the receiver went downfield; the quarterback thought he was going to stop — which resulted in a third-quarter interception by Justin Tryon and a 69-yard return for a touchdown. The Sun Devils have gone eight consecutive games with an interception and have returned three for touchdowns this season.
Brink, who finished the game with 369 yards passing, which put him ahead of Jason Gesser in Cougars record books for career passing yardage, started slowly, hitting just one of his first nine attempts against ASU’s man-to-man defense. The Cougars were blanked in the first quarter for the first time this season.
“It really threw our timing off,” Brink said of the Sun Devil scheme. “They were getting in our receivers’ faces, making it hard. We had to make adjustments there in the second quarter.”
The Washington State defense kept the game close. It limited an ASU offense that was averaging 173 yards rushing to 79, in large part because of a season-best total of seven sacks. Four of those sacks came courtesy sophomore Andy Mattingly, who made his first career start in place of Kendrick Dunn.
“We knew it was on us,” said Mattingly of the Cougar defense, which came in yielding 36.4 points a game and was last in the Pac-10 in four categories. “Our offense, they’ve been doing their thing all season. We as a defense, we’ve got to hold them. … Our offense is going to score. If we hold them to under 20, we’ll win.”
Besides success against the run — 50 yards in losses from the sacks helped offset Ryan Torain’s 116 yards on 24 carries — the Cougars also shored up their third-down defense — WSU was last in the nation, giving up first downs nearly 7 out 10 times — limiting the Sun Devils to six first downs in 14 tries.
And ASU quarterback Rudy Carpenter, under constant pressure from a WSU defense that blitzed on all but one play, threw for just 217 yards, 93 less than his average. The Cougars also came up with two interceptions, Husain Abdullah’s third and Cory Evans’ first.
“The players played good, that was the secret,” said defensive backs coach Leon Burtnett of a defensive effort that limited ASU to 296 yards of total offense and two touchdowns. “The players make plays. And they made plays today.
“We decided to put the pressure back there on those kids and see how it rode with them. For the most part they held up pretty good, considering that was an explosive offense.”
The Cougars led 10-7 at halftime, and after Tryon’s interception return for a touchdown, Brink connected with junior tight end Devin Frischknecht for a 13-yard scoring strike to take back the lead 17-14, and start a back-and-forth exchange.
The Sun Devils Carpenter hit Brady Conrad for a 3-yard touchdown pass, and after the point-after attempt was blocked, the Cougars tied the score at 20 with a Abdollmohammadi field goal.
Brandon Gibson finished with five catches for 80 yards, Bumpus had six for 62, freshman Jeshua Anderson, in a career day, added three more as eight Cougars caught balls.
But none of it was enough.
“We battled and what-not but it is a loss,” Brink said. “We had that game in our grasp and we had opportunities to make plays to win that game and we didn’t do it.”
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