As each week of the 2013 football season passes, the Washington State Cougars try to improve on something. 

Head coach Mike Leach has repeated over and over that the team’s philosophy is to always get a week better. The team has yet to waver on that goal as it heads into the week of the Seattle game against the Stanford Cardinal on Saturday. 

“You’ve got the opportunity to win one game a week and your full focus needs to be on that,” Leach said. “You need to steadily improve and get better at it. I think as a team we’ve done that. Our team’s been very responsive that way.”

The defense has especially stepped up this year, nesting itself at the top of the league in passing defense. This week, the Cougars rank second in passing yards allowed, behind only Florida State, according to NCAA.com. 

Redshirt senior cornerback Nolan Washington said the way the defense has played so far this season is nothing unusual to him. 

“I feel as a defense, we set a high bar for ourselves,” Washington said. “Looking back at last year, we didn’t really live up to that, so as a defense, we set a goal this offseason that we want to be a top-10 defense. So us doing it now doesn’t surprise us. We know if we go out and we play our game that we can dominate anybody.”

The defense isn’t the only source of confidence on the team, though. The Cardinal have held their opponents to about 20 points per game this season, but despite that, wide receiver Gabe Marks is not worried about the Cougar offensive unit that has scored more than 40 points in its last two games. 

“We’re built to score points, so it should be fun,” Marks said. “They think they can stop a lot of people and we think we can score on a lot of people, so we’ll see who’s the better man.”

Stanford is ranked No. 5 in the nation entering Saturday’s game, but Leach and the players are trying to focus on just playing football. 

“Right now, we just have to worry about the things that we do well and the things we don’t well, the things we have to fix,” linebacker Darryl Monroe said. “If you start to believe in the hype, then you get distracted from what you’re doing and that’s when you have a letdown, so we don’t listen to the hype, we don’t believe in it. We just go out and play.”

Leach echoed Monroe, saying the team needs to focus on being the best it can be, and that it shouldn’t let another team, no matter how good, distract from its own preparation or playmaking. 

The Cougars continue to evolve each week, improving on the fly and growing closer together as the season progresses.

Marks said the team hasn’t peaked yet, and there is a lot more to come. He added that everyone comes into practice trying to perfect their skills and get ready for the next opponent. 

That next opponent happens to be the Cardinal, who will arrive in Seattle looking to stop the Cougars’ three-game winning streak. The Cougars will use this week to prepare as much as possible to prevent that from happening. 

“This team is different,” Washington said. “We expect a lot more, so just winning three straight doesn’t really mean anything if you lose the next week.”