Best's 'EKG's' look to rebound after first conference loss

Halloween’s house of horrors seems to open early for the Eastern Washington football team in their every-so-often visits to play Southern Utah University.

The scary woods are not up the road at Idaho’s Silverwood theme park this time of year for the Eagles, but down amidst of the scrubby junipers and desert mountains of the curiously-named city of Cedar City. Not sure if there is a species of the town’s namesake tree anywhere within eyeball range.

Eastern has now suffered two notable defeats on the artificial turf of Eccles Coliseum, the most recent a 48-28 loss last Saturday which knocked the Eagles out of the top-10 in Football Championship Subdivision polls, and its undefeated perch atop the Big Sky Conference.

It was certainly an eerie ending for Eastern to a game that had a spooky, slow start for Southern Utah, which just last week also knocked instate rival Weber State out of the unbeaten ranks in the conference, too.

Now the Thunderbirds have another Eagle trophy to go with the one from 2012. That’s when then No. 1-ranked Eastern saw a last-second field goal zap them from the ranks of the undefeated by a 30-27 score on the third weekend in October.

The 2012 game, somewhat like the one last Saturday, was also one of missed opportunities — sure touchdown drops from the likes of Brandon Kaufman and Nick Edwards, the best sticky fingers the Eagles have had since you know who.

Saturday in the high desert of far Southwest Utah, Eastern’s high-stakes Jenga tower finally toppled. One too many turnovers in a crazy season where the Eagles had been a success, carefully winning five straight, despite the oddity of losing the turnover battle in the majority of those match-ups.

Which one caused the collapse? Two stand out.

After Eastern had taken a 14-0 lead in the first quarter on touchdowns from Nsimba Webster and a run from Sam McPherson, Antoine Custer was trying his darnedest to insert the dagger and put his team up 21-0. But he had the ball stripped from him on the SUU 17.

“We just couldn’t muster up what magic we had in the first quarter (the rest of the game),” head coach Aaron Best said on his weekly coach’s show this past Monday.

Quarterback Gage Gubrud really did have another pretty darn good night going 24 of 44 for 246 yards and a touchdown. But, he threw three picks, arguably, the killer coming after just two plays and 19-seconds. The T-Birds had taken a 32-28 lead in the fourth and in the span of less 70 seconds they scored again and led 39-28 with 6:24 to play.

Best gave credit to the Thunderbirds on half of the four giveaways. “Two of the four, nah, we could have done something about that,” he said.

“We’ve been able to overcome, but you can’t flirt with fire too much before the fire burns you,” Best said. “And it got us this week.”

For two weeks in a row Southern Utah has been battle tested and beat ranked opponents. They’ve won 12 of its last 13 games on the home turf.

In the process, Eastern had their 12-game Big Sky winning streak come to a close but still, the Eagles have won 44 of their last 50 conference games since a 0-2 start in 2011.

Leave it to Eastern’s sports information director Dave Cook to put those numbers in some perspective. The only Big Sky school which has come close to that in the 54-year history of the league was Montana, which won 50 of 55 games from 1995-2002 and 46 of 51 from 2003-2009.

Now, No. 12 Eastern gets a week to decompress as much as possible from football and reconnect with family and friends Best said.

After that, the question is which EKGs — Best’s Eastern Kinda’ Guys — show up on Nov. 4 for the Homecoming tussle with Weber State? The team that, following a narrow 14-13 win over the Wildcats in 2015, lost its next three, ending a string of three straight playoff appearances?

Or is it the ones who will look in the mirror during the off week and find the swagger for another deep run in the playoffs?

I’ll take bets on the latter.

Paul Delaney can be reached at [email protected].