WSU announces signing of Gage Gubrud, who will practice in the spring

The graduate transfer of former Eastern Washington quarterback Gage Gubrud to the Washington State Cougars is now officially on, as the school announced this morning via Twitter that Gubrud had been added to the 2019 recruiting class.

It had been reported that Gubrud had initially been denied a sixth season of eligibility by the NCAA — he missed most of this past season season with an injury — but he has won his appeal for a medical hardship waiver and will join the chase this summer to replace Gardner Minshew II as the Cougars’ starting quarterback.

There’s also more good news for the Cougars: According to the school, Gubrud has already earned his bachelor’s degree and is enrolling at WSU immediately, which means he will be eligible to participate in spring practices.

“We are excited for Gage to come in and compete with the quarterbacks on our team,” Mike Leach said via news release. “He is an extremely experienced and productive player who led Eastern Washington to great heights in his time there. It’s not often that you can add a quarterback to your roster that has started 28 games and thrown for nearly 10,000 yards. We are looking forward to getting him on campus and finishing his collegiate career in a WSU Cougar uniform.”

Gubrud had an excellent career at EWU; in addition to all those yards, he threw for 87 touchdowns and 8.6 yards per attempt, also adding more than 1,000 rushing yards. He’ll be joining a crowded quarterback competition that will likely feature redshirt seniors Trey Tinsley and Anthony Gordon (each of whom might have been the starter had something happened to Minshew) and redshirt freshman Cammon Cooper, WSU’s most heralded QB recruit under Mike Leach. Perhaps Connor Neville, John Bledsoe or incoming freshman Gunner Cruz can work their way into that mix, but it’s considered unlikely.

One other interesting thing about that tweet — it says Gubrud is the “final piece” of the 2019 class. By our count, WSU still has a scholarship to give. Maybe there’s some accounting going on that we don’t know about (for example, Oscar Draguicevich III has reportedly been given a scholarship, and sometimes giving a walk-on a scholarship counts against the initial 25 scholarships that can be given in a year), or maybe whoever’s running the social media account just phrased it badly.

Whatever the case, here’s the incoming class as we know it: