Dec. 25—Zevi Eckhaus knew about as much as the rest of the world did. Earlier this month, as the Washington State quarterback waited for star John Mateer to decide whether to stay or leave the school, Eckhaus didn’t have any tips on Mateer’s thinking, no clues on which way he might have been leaning.
Eckhaus, the Cougars’ backup QB this fall, knew one thing: He would make a decision based on Mateer’s. If Mateer left, Eckhaus would stick it out and give himself a chance to take over the reins. If Mateer stayed, Eckhaus would have to leave.
“John had a hell of a season. He deserved all the time that he needed to make that decision,” Eckhaus said. “You know, I can only control my attitude and my mental space, my mental energy throughout that time. I tried to keep a positive attitude, business as usual.”
So Eckhaus’ life began to change on the night of Dec. 15, when Mateer used a team group chat to inform teammates that he would be entering the transfer portal and moving on from WSU, ending his three-year stint as a Cougar. The move became official the following morning, reverberating around college football, and later that week Mateer signed with Oklahoma, following former WSU offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle and QBs coach John Kuceyeski there.
It has repercussions for much of WSU’s program, especially now that former head coach Jake Dickert moved on to Wake Forest. But for Eckhaus, it means he is now WSU’s QB1 against No. 22 Syracuse in the Holiday Bowl, set for 5 p.m. Friday in San Diego. It’s the opportunity he missed out on this regular season, when coaches awarded Mateer the starting job over Eckhaus after fall camp.
“I’m really excited. An opportunity that not a lot of people get to experience,” Eckhaus said. “I’m very, very fortunate, very blessed, to be in this position that I’m in right now. Just really excited. The guys are excited, the coaches are excited, the fans are excited, everybody’s kinda excited.”
It will be far from a normal bowl experience for Washington State. The program is missing a head coach, offensive coordinator, defensive coordinator, running backs coach and quarterbacks coach. As of Wednesday, 28 Cougars had entered the transfer portal, including more than a dozen starters, but the team voted to allow portal-bound players to play in the bowl game.
How many plan on doing so remains to be seen. At a media availability earlier this week in San Diego, acting head coach Pete Kaligis said all but three Cougars who have entered the portal will play in the bowl game — but six have committed to other programs, and it seems unlikely their new schools would give them the green light to compete for a WSU team they have decided to move on from.
Either way, it will amount to an abormal bowl game showing for the Cougs, who raced to an 8-1 start this regular season, rising as high as No. 18 in the College Football Playoff. They then proceeded to drop their final three games — setbacks to New Mexico, Oregon State and Wyoming — falling out of the rankings, tumbling into an offseason mired in uncertainty and controversy.
But it’s an opportunity for Eckhaus, who spent three years breaking records at FCS Bryant before transferring to WSU in January. He’s learned a lot about himself this year, he says, in large part because he went through something he hadn’t in a long time: Being a backup.
In high school, Eckhaus took over Los Angeles-area Culver City High’s starting QB job in the second half of his freshman year, then started each of his final three years. Then he started all three years with the Bulldogs. So when this August rolled around, he had gone nearly seven years without being the guy.
For the most part, Eckhaus has learned how to be a leader without being a starter, he said, a lesson he had been in no position to learn recently. It’s about mentality, Eckhaus has learned, and choosing between two mentalities.
Option one: I’m not gonna play, so I don’t have to do this as hard, and I don’t have to spend as much time.
Option two: This is an opportunity for me to grow as an individual, as an athlete, to grow as a person.
“I try to take that approach,” Eckhaus said. “Learn more about myself, see how I can still be a leader and still make an impact on the team as much as possible, even when I’m not making a direct impact on the field on gamedays. And that’s kinda the approach that I’ve had, and I think that by doing that, I gained a lot of respect from the guys around me.”
It wasn’t always so easy for Eckhaus, especially in the first few days after coaches named Mateer the starter. People in his orbit offered support and encouragement, motivating him to stay focused and keep preparing like he’s the starter. What Eckhaus realized before long, though, is that he had to make a decision. He had to treat it like an opportunity and not a roadblock, otherwise he might risk future chances for himself.
That sturdy mindframe has served Eckhaus well recently. At the beginning of the month, a day or two after WSU dropped its regular-season finale against Wyoming, Arbuckle called a meeting with the team’s offense to inform the unit he was taking Oklahoma’s OC job. Soon after, Kuceyeski joined Arbuckle in Norman, meeting with only the Cougs’ quarterbacks.
Eckhaus went to the Arbuckle home in Pullman to bid farewell to his OC and his family. “I was glad that they had at least addressed us and kinda informed us,” Eckhaus said.
“I was happy for him,” Eckhaus said of Arbuckle. “In the coaching business, you always wanna try to go higher and higher and higher up, unless you’re like a head coach that wants to stay somewhere for an extensive period of time. But I was happy for him. He’s a hard worker. He’s a great play-caller. He’s a great coach. He had an opportunity that he couldn’t, didn’t want to pass up.”
As for his own future, Eckhaus is staying mum, saying he’s only focused on Friday’s bowl game and doing what he can to upset the heavily favored Orange, which would “mean everything,” he said. Eckhaus has one more year of eligibility, but for now, he says he’s only worried about Friday’s game and the end of his first season at WSU.
“When that concludes, then I’ll start thinking about my future and what that entails,” Eckhaus said. “To be completely honest, I haven’t even taken a second to really think about that with anybody.”
