Confidence has emanated this season from the man who now lines up under center for the Washington State Cougars on football game days.            

Quarterback Connor Halliday knows the feeling of both the highest of highs and lowest of lows as the leader of the offensive unit.      

Yet, he has played through both the praise and the criticism with a motivation he has found from his father. 

“I’ve been playing quarterback since I was really little and my dad played quarterback in college. I kinda grew up on it,” Halliday said. “My dad always mentioned to me, ‘Hey, if this is what you want to do, once you get to that level it’s going to be a lot of pressure, a lot of people blaming you,’ so I always had an idea that was going to be the case.”    

He said his dad, Duane Halliday, was his hero growing up. Duane went to college at Boise State University and also played quarterback. The younger Halliday, Connor, said he wears No. 12 because that’s what his dad wore when he played.           

“When I was little, I wanted to do everything my dad did,” Halliday said.           

There is evidence of Halliday taking after his dad at a young age. The redshirt junior remembers photographs of him standing in front of a plastic lawn mower, trying to act just like his dad who was mowing the law.           

Before Halliday came to WSU, he dreamed of playing football at Boise State like his father. The Broncos even recruited him, but then extended an offer to Bryan Bennett, who was the backup quarterback at Oregon before transferring to Southeastern Louisiana at the beginning of 2013.            

While disappointed, Halliday still found the positive in the fact that he still gets to play Division I football at WSU.

The quarterback has not allowed much to bring him down during his time here as a Cougar. Halliday has remained confident in almost every situation, except after the Oregon State game last year, in which he was 9 of 20 and threw three interceptions.           

Halliday has kept his swagger through everything else, though. Even the competition with Jeff Tuel for the quarterback position did not significantly faze him.            

“The competition brings out the best in anybody,” Halliday said. “The frustrating part of it was, in the middle of the year, the back and the forth stuff. That was tough for both Jeff and I because it’s tough to play quarterback looking over your shoulder.”        

Perhaps Halliday’s resilience through the years has come from two of his strengths. First, Halliday said he genuinely cares about people in his life and wants to seem them succeed. He is always looking for ways to help them.            

Second, on the field he said he tries to have a short memory for both the touchdown passes and the interceptions, so that he doesn’t get hung up on the highs or the lows.            

But, no matter how high or how low Halliday feels on any given day, his place in Pullman remains constant.

Before he arrived at WSU, he said Cougar fans would make him mad because of their obnoxious passion for their team on Apple Cup days at school. Now, Halliday understands the pride and the connection of Cougars everywhere. 

“It’s like a family of 30,000,” he said. “Everybody truly cares about you. Everybody wants to be part of something. Whether it’s a football team, whether it’s a club, everybody wants to be united with other people in some way. Being a Cougar, you’re united with millions.”          

Halliday said when he dons the Crimson and Gray, he continues to follow the biggest role model of his life: wearing the number, playing the position and displaying the same confidence as his father.