Jackquintin Bal jumped a Noah Fifita throw and took it 25 yards for a touchdown, Caden Pinnick ran in an 11-yarder, and Washington State led Arizona 14-0 in the first quarter Saturday in Pullman. The Cougars still led 17-14 at halftime. Then Arizona scored 17 straight, WSU answered once the rest of the way, and Arizona left with a 34-24 win. Pinnick went 24 of 41 for 241 yards with a touchdown, threw an interception in the first quarter and lost a fumble while being tackled.
The part that should worry you most is the run game. Against Arizona, the Cougars ran for 94 yards as a team, with 335 total yards and 241 passing, in their first game against a Power Four opponent since the loss at Kansas State. That is the whole question of Moore's first season running a program anywhere. He took over after Jake Dickert left for Wake Forest following the 2024 season, and so far his team has played well for a half and then stopped running the ball, stopped pressuring the quarterback, and stopped scoring.
The game: Fresno State at Washington State, Saturday, 6:30 p.m. PT, USA Network
Conference play starts here, and it starts with Moore facing the staff room he came out of. He spent six seasons at Fresno State. He was receivers coach, then passing game coordinator, then offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach in 2022, the year Fresno State won the Mountain West and beat this same Washington State program 29-6 in the LA Bowl. Three years at Missouri followed, then Pullman. It is a genuinely strange first Pac-12 game for him, and it is also the worst possible opponent for WSU's current problem.
Fresno State enters ranked 5th nationally in turnover margin at +7; Washington State ranks 120th at -4. Pinnick has now put the ball on the ground or in the wrong hands in each of the season's meaningful games.
So watch the first-down runs. If Kirby Vorhees and Maxwell Woods are getting four and five yards on early downs, Pinnick is throwing on third-and-short instead of third-and-nine. If WSU is behind schedule again, Fresno State will get its chances.
Two smaller things that could swing a close one. Jack Stevens missed a field goal against Arizona, and Moore again pointed at the protection rather than the kicker, "We had a guy fall down. And that is unacceptable." That followed the Duquesne game, where Stevens missed a 30-yard field goal and the first extra point of his career and Moore said the staff had to look at the whole operation, snap through hold through protection. Two straight weeks of a broken kicking play, in a game this tight, is three or four points WSU cannot spare.
The other is the passing game without Tony Freeman, out for the season with a torn ACL. Branden Ganashamoorthy caught four passes for 67 yards and a touchdown against Arizona. If the run game gets squeezed again, he is the one replacement receiver who has proven he can carry real volume.
And Bal's 25-yard pick-six, along with his career-high nine tackles, is the reminder that Trent Bray's defense can still take the ball away. It just stopped doing anything disruptive once Arizona settled in. Fresno State protects the ball better than Arizona does, so those early-down stops matter more than the splash play.
What a win is worth is that it puts WSU's conference title game odds at roughly 46% rather than about 13%, and nudges playoff odds to 1.3% instead of 0.3%. Those are two branches of the same Saturday night, not a number moving. There is no bye until Nov. 7, so whatever is wrong gets fixed in practice this week or not at all.
Utah State at Boise State: root for Utah State
Saturday, 4:30 p.m. PT, CBSSN. No. 22 Boise State is the class of the league's top tier, and every loss it takes clears room in the race WSU is nominally still in. Utah State wins this about 11% of the time. If the Aggies pull it off, WSU's title-game odds sit near 32%, against about 29% if Boise State wins, a difference of about 2.6 percentage points. Worth an eye on the second screen while you wait for your own kickoff; not worth rearranging the evening.
More at the interactive guide and the methodology.