When Washington State pieced together its running back room in January, the setup looked like one of the smartest moves of Kirby Moore’s early run in Pullman. Kirby Vorhees decided to stay after initially planning to enter the transfer portal.
Maxwell Woods came back, too. Then Leo Pulalasi entered the portal, changed course, and signed a new NIL revenue-sharing deal with the Cougars.
At the time, it was easy to picture that trio giving WSU a real edge on the ground. Moore’s best offenses at Missouri were built around a productive run game, so the fit seemed obvious.
Eight games later, the picture looks a lot different.
WSU is 1-3, which is the record the Cougars were expected to have at this point, but the offense has not looked the way Moore and offensive coordinator Matt Miller hoped it would when they built the attack around quarterback Caden Pinnick. The run game, in particular, has been a problem. And for all the talk in January about a loaded backfield, the numbers against FBS opponents tell the story.
Against Washington, WSU’s running backs combined for 38 yards. Against Kansas State, they totaled 74.
On Saturday against Arizona, they managed just 59. That adds up to 171 yards across those three games, or 57 per game.
The one big outlier came against FCS Duquesne, when the Cougars piled up 316 rushing yards and both Woods and Vorhees topped 100. But that was against one of the weakest defenses in the FCS, so it doesn’t tell the full story of what this ground game has been against higher-level competition.
Moore knows the backs need more work and more touches, and he pointed to a couple of ways that could happen. One is getting them more involved as receivers.
“We gotta find ways to get them matched up,” Moore said. “They make it tough, Arizona does, with how much they pressure because you are worried about the quarterback being hot at times, and you wanna make sure you’re protecting him as much as you can.
And then we gotta stay on the field. That’s the best way to get the backs more touches, right?
We gotta convert on third downs. The four drives there in the third quarter, we had three punts and a turnover.
That’s not good enough.”
That third quarter against Arizona was rough in every way. WSU punted on three drives and lost a fumble on the other, the turnover coming when Pinnick tried to escape pressure and got dragged down as he attempted to throw the ball away. It was Pinnick’s fifth turnover of the season and the Cougars’ seventh as a team.
The lack of third-down success made the problem worse. WSU went 0-for-7 on third down in the second half, which killed drives and also cut off chances to feed the backs in space. That matters because getting the running backs more touches could help the whole offense open up for Pinnick.
There’s also a hint in the passing numbers that WSU may already have some useful answers in-house. The Cougars’ running backs have been targeted 22 times this season and have caught 14 of those passes, a 64% completion rate. That’s a little better than Pinnick’s 61% completion rate overall.
Now the Cougars get a chance to try something different. Fresno State comes to Pullman on Saturday, and that matchup should offer more opportunities for WSU’s offense than the Power 4 games have so far.
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