Wildcats’ Traveling Man

With his third team,  CWU QB Morgan primed for playoffs ||

YAKIMA, Wash. — One by one they left, thinning the ranks of quarterback at Central Washington.

First Nick Lomax, a transfer from Boise State and the son of ex-NFL star Neil Lomax, quit school. Then Jordan Rasmussen, from Montana State, followed suit, and Johnny DuRocher, who came to CWU from Washington, left during preseason camp.

Whatever the reasons — injuries, perceived rank in the competition or others — a multi-player battle to succeed Wildcat legend Mike Reilly was reduced to a head-to-head duel between redshirt freshman Ryan Robertson and senior transfer Cole Morgan.

Robertson, perhaps because he’d been in the system for a year, eventually got the nod, but coach Blaine Bennett made clear that ex-Western Washington backup Morgan remained in the picture.

So the 23-year-old Ballard High product played a little here and a series there, and kept himself ready.

“Leaving, after I’d come over here last summer, never crossed my mind,” Morgan says. “I never got frustrated. You never go into a situation expecting to sit on the bench, but even when I wasn’t starting I never got frustrated.”

Good thing, for Morgan and the Wildcats.

Because after jump-starting Central’s Oct. 3 win at Dixie State and leading a second-half comeback a week later at Humboldt State, Morgan trotted onto the Qwest Field turf to start the third quarter of the Battle In Seattle against Western Oregon facing a three-touchdown deficit.

“I didn’t play great,” Morgan said after the game, “not by any means.”

But the Wildcats won.

Since then Morgan has kept playing and Central has kept winning, and now he’s the starting quarterback for the No. 1-ranked team in all of NCAA Division II.

“Yeah,” he says, smiling when reminded of it all. “I’m glad I made the move over here. But it’s not like it came out of the blue. When I was still at Washington State and wasn’t even thinking of transferring, Jerome (Williams, CWU safety) was already in my ear.”

Saturday, when Central hosts Tarleton State for a second-round playoff game, the other members of the Wildcats’ offense will have Morgan in their ears.

He will be The Man, so to speak, the player in charge of the huddle and the offense.

Make no mistake, Morgan’s role will not compare with that of Reilly, who for the previous four years had started every Central game and had broken virtually every Central passing record. Nor does he want it to.

Questioned about being a quarterback who is asked to not lose games while Reilly was relied on to win them, Morgan says, “I think you have the situation confused with the fact that we now have a running game. It’s my understanding that the running game last year wasn’t nearly as good as this year’s.

“And I think if Mike were sitting here he’d say that he’d like to have had a better running game, and in an ideal situation he’d like to have a balanced offense. I wouldn’t want to be in the situation Mike was in. I don’t want to throw it 60 times a game.”

To date, he hasn’t had to. And barring the end of life as we know it, he won’t.

In three games as Central’s starter, Morgan has completed 42 of 72 passes (58 percent) for 541 yards and three touchdowns with no interceptions. That’s an average of 24 attempts, and it’s possible that his biggest number is the zero in the interception column.

“I think Cole has done an excellent job,” Bennett says. “At first he was so excited and had such a high energy level that it took him awhile to come off that incredible emotional feeling of, hey, I’m starting my first college football game after working my butt off for five years and transferring to two different schools (from Washington State to Western Washington to Central).

“Now he’s into a more normal routine. He’s not worried about not being the starter, he’s not worried about how long it took him to become the starter or that he needs to perform well in his next series to stay the starter. He’s our quarterback, everyone wants him to be the quarterback and he has great confidence in himself. It’s really his team right now.”

It’s also one Morgan marvels at.

“At Western last year, we weren’t a bad team,” he says of the 6-5 squad on which he played in only one game. “But we had five offensive linemen who could realistically play. Here we have seven or eight. At Western had four wide receivers — here we have seven or eight. We had one tailback there, we have three here.

“And our defense … we lose one linebacker from BYU (Matt Ah You) to injury and we plug in a guy from Alabama (Prince Hall).”

While most have been surprised at Central’s 11-0 run, Morgan said he had an early-on inkling that this team was capable of special things.

Last summer, not long after his arrival in Ellensburg after transferring from Western where football had been dropped, he and other Wildcats drove to a seven-on-seven passing-game competition in Pullman.

There Central played Idaho, Eastern Washington and Washington State, and ended up beating all three.

“We played Idaho twice — they beat us and we beat them,” Morgan says. “It got pretty heated. I got into it with one of their safeties, but we said, look, it’s not our fault the score’s in our favor.

“All the other teams are out there in their matching outfits and we’re totally not matching. We looked like the Little Rascals running around out there.”

Not so much now, though.

With the defense dominating more than many expected, allowing only 61.4 rushing yards and 11.6 points a game and CWU’s own ground game producing almost 40 more yards per outing than last year’s, the Wildcats started strong and have sustained momentum while having to beat each team in the GNAC twice.

They also survived a mid-season flat spot offensively, when redshirt freshman Ryan Robertson’s productivity waned and his confidence apparently suffered.

Enter Morgan.

“I’ve played a lot of football on a lot of teams in a lot of different situations, and I’ve already reached some meaningful goals,” he says. “To sign a letter of intent with a Pac-10 team and to actually run onto the turf at the Rose Bowl — even though I was deep on the bench and didn’t have the slightest possibility of playing — those things are very important to me. But then to be on this team, and to be the starting quarterback, is unbelievable.”

And, possibly, karmic.

“Now that he’s into a more normal routine,” Bennett says, “he’s much more businesslike, much more confident. His attitude and psyche and mental approach right now are perfect, I think, for a playoff run.”

The Morgan File

Height: 6-3

Weight: 203

Age: 23

High schools: Roosevelt, Ballard

Colleges: Washington State (2005, 2006, 2007), Western Washington (2008), Central Washington (2009)

Western stats

2008: 1 game, 4 completions, 6 attempts, 0 touchdowns, 0 interceptions

Central stats

2009: 9 games,  76 completions, 140 attempts, 7 touchdowns, 2 interceptions

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