Friday Prediction: Colorado at Washington State
Despite having thrown 315 passes already this season, Washington State, which hosts Colorado at 5 p.m. Saturday, has allowed only six sacks. This is a remarkable statistic.
There are only nine FBS teams who have allowed fewer than six sacks, and none of them have anywhere near 315 passing attempts. The next highest is Clemson, which has 200.
If you've seen an Air Raid team before -- you have -- you already know this is because Washington State gets the ball out of the quarterback's hands rapidly, and by design. In fact, the Air Raid basically came from BYU coach LaVell Edwards, who created it for the specific purpose of mitigating the advantage of opponents with bigger, faster defensive lines.
So that's what Washington State does, and it doesn't make the Cougars unbeatable. They already have three losses.
What it does do, though, is create a really, really, really bad matchup for Colorado.
The Buffaloes are 117th in the country in pass defense. Considering there are only 130 FBS teams, this makes the CU secondary one of the worst in the country -- and that was before the injuries.
Now that the Buffaloes are pulling redshirts and playing true freshmen like K.J. Trujillo, an already soft secondary is in even worse shape.
Ideally, you'd have a pass rush that could make up for that to some degree, but Colorado doesn't have much of one. The Buffaloes only have 10 sacks this year, ranking next-to-last in the Pac-12.
So even though Washington State is a highly beatable team, there is no clear path to victory here for Colorado. The Buffaloes' best hope would be to junk up the game with long possessions and lots of runs, but that's not what CU does best, and it's still going to be a mess when WSU has the ball.
Washington State 49, Colorado 38.
