In a football season that’s so far been all over the place, Washington State set off alarm bells last week with a 59-10 defeat to North Texas, which has to rank among the Cougars’ most stark defeats in history.

Which naturally leads WSU fans to wonder whether something similar might be ahead Saturday when they host a better team in Washington.

That prospect stirs another question in the minds of Cougars who might already be prone to attaching dark motives to anything purple and gold:

Would the Huskies, given the chance, run it up on Washington State?

Of course they would, say the skeptics. Why wouldn’t they, when, as former placekicker Chuck Nelson described to me in “Too Good to Be Through,” Washington fans put WSU in the category of an “irritant”?

This is a nuanced issue.

A year ago, WSU came into Lumen Field in Seattle and took down the Huskies, 24-19. The most memorable play was Washington’s fourth-and-one, goal-line brain cramp, when the Huskies opted to run speed option to the short side of the field, with Will Rogers ultimately pitching the ball to Jonah Coleman, who was bullied out of bounds at the WSU 3.

Ball game.

Washington’s first-year coach, Jedd Fisch, was pilloried for the play call on sports-talk radio, and indeed, it was the most condemned thing he did all season.

Hugh Millen, the ex-UW quarterback-turned-radio-analyst, sized it up like this: “It’s just a really bad play. The odds you’re going to get that play blocked against that front – it’d be like drawing to an inside flush. Everything is going to have to line up.

“I’m not trying to impugn Jedd Fisch as a coach. I’m impugning his entire thought process with that play. That play was the Washington Huskies getting their ass handed to us from a coaching standpoint.”

So there’s reason that Fisch might be chafing to make amends with the Cougars. Still, it was nothing they did other than play defense, and even as their fans and players celebrated with a massive mosh pit on the field, it didn’t seem as though there were actions or words that would invite retaliation. (That might not be the case if we’re talking about Jayden DeLaura planting the WSU flag at Husky Stadium after a 40-13 win in 2021.)

Of course, revenge for the loss would be a natural inclination among remaining UW players, even as most of the Cougars on that roster have departed, leaving 70-some new players on the manifest at WSU.

But there are two other factors that add spice to the question. First, Pat Chun is UW athletic director, having left the same job at WSU in 2024. Does his presence tilt the Huskies toward compassion, or nuclear proliferation?

Then there’s the matter of how we got here. The Huskies are in the Big Ten now, having left with Oregon two years ago, and while the move was certainly defensible, it proved to be a killer for the Cougars, who with Oregon State, were eventually left to their own devices in a decimated Pac-12.

Does that enter in? Would it be a bad – and surely lasting – blow to détente between the programs if quarterback Demond Williams was throwing deep balls in the fourth quarter with the Huskies up by five touchdowns?

If the contingency of a Washington blowout becomes reality, the Huskies might not be inclined to pour it on with their starters. They host Ohio State next week.

Tuesday, as the “Husky Honks” were discussing the Apple Cup matchup with WSU on KJR-FM, the former UW All-American running back, Greg Lewis, dismissed the Cougars as “trash,” referring to the quality of the team. When that raised eyebrows among his co-hosts, Lewis amended the description – I guess -- to “garbage.”

Whether the Cougars are capable of a response is the question.