Give the conquering Cougs credit for winning the Apple Cup despite UW mistakes

Jake Dickert carried proof of his confidence into the interview room.

A few minutes after 4:30 p.m. on Saturday, Washington State’s fourth-year coach arrived at his postgame press conference with a Diet Coke in one hand and a cigar in the other. A day prior, he asked Kingston Fernandez — WSU’s assistant director of operations — to bring a box of secret cigars to the 116^th Apple Cup.

“Don’t tell any of the coaches,” Dickert texted Fernandez, a former Coug defensive lineman. “But be ready.”

In a 24-19 win over Washington, Dickert’s undaunted Cougs were ready for everything. On fourth-and-goal from the 1-yard line, with 1:12 on the clock, UW quarterback Will Rogers took a shotgun snap and ran the option to his right. After being bottled up at the 3, Rogers desperately lateraled to running back Jonah Coleman, who was corralled by linebacker Kyle Thornton to essentially end the Apple Cup.

It’s fair to criticize Husky head coach Jedd Fisch for a confounding final call, asking a quarterback with minus-339 career rushing yards to win the game by gambling on his greatest weakness. Especially since wide receiver Giles Jackson — who Fisch first called the play for, before taking a timeout to reconsider — compiled eight catches for 162 yards and a touchdown in the best game of his career.

“That’s on me. I made a bad call. We didn’t execute the call. We lost the game,” Fisch said afterwards, concisely summarizing.

Undoubtedly, Husky fans will say they beat themselves. They’ll point to Fisch’s untimely option, as well as the decision to turn to freshman quarterback Demond Williams II near the end of the first half, when Rogers was already rolling. They’ll point to 16 (!) backbreaking penalties for 135 yards — namely, a holding call on nickelback Jordan Shaw that nullified a punt and directly preceded a WSU touchdown three plays later.

“We showed them a look that we’d done before, but we had a little bit of a changeup to it,” Dickert said of the fourth-down stop. “I’m not going to go deep into it. They thought they could get the speed option out the back door, and we didn’t give them the blitz look that it looked to be. I thought they made the right call with what we showed them. But credit to our defensive staff: that’s two weeks in a row, coming with a great plan and our guys flying around and making plays.”

They made plays despite a moment that could have been too big. On Saturday, Lumen Field was effectively split down the middle — crimson to the west, purple to the east, sound bouncing back and forth between the uprights. Before a crowd of 57,567, one team seemed consistently comfortable in the chaos.

Spoiler: it wasn’t the Big Ten team.

Or the one that played for a national championship barely nine months ago.