Huskies Win With Defense, Offense Lags Behind
A lot of Pac-12 debuts in the past few days have led to widespread assumptions and overreaction. BYU clobbers WSU, so Mike Leach’s Air Raid must be a failure. Stanford struggles against San Jose State, they must be a sham post-Luck. In the same way, people will look at Washington’s bland 21-12 victory over San Diego State and say the offense is missing last year’s veterans more than anyone realized.
They would be right. Even though Seferian-Jenkins and Kasen Williams put up solid numbers, and Price avoided any massive lapses in judgement, the offense was very out of sync and seemed to constantly be stopped just outside of the red zone. I don’t think it’s anything to panic about, but it doesn’t inspire a massive amount of confidence going in to the LSU game. The night’s events gave fans nothing to point to and say “hey, if they play like this, they have a chance in Baton Rouge.” There’s no reason to assume the Huskies can’t put together a more complete effort next week, but everyone will have to wait and see. For now, UW scraped out the uneventful W, and lived to fight, and hopefully impress, another day. In the meantime, the lack of offense may take away from the praise of a solid defensive debut.
Still, it is worth being excited about their performance. It was flawed, certainly. The poor defensive discipline led to Ryan Katz looking much, much more athletic as a scrambler than he truly is. He had nearly 100 yards rushing! The defensive backs blew coverage multiple times, at one point for a wide open touchdown pass in the second quarter. Still, twelve points is certainly a victory in any situation. Last year, with the offense only putting up three scores, I am certain the defense would not have held down the fort well enough to prevent a loss. The score would have been 35-21. The defense made plays, and actually seemed to be capable of stopping third down conversions.
So don’t over think it. Just wait and see next week and be glad the season started with a win.
As far as injury, Jesse Callier is a serious concern. Getting an MRI on his knee. Ben Riva’s broken forearm is a serious loss, but Desmond Trufant’s injury was just a tweaked hamstring. We will have more analysis of the game tomorrow, including weekly awards and a breakdown of the issues with the run game and offensive line, and some discussion of Shaq Thompson and Josh Shirley’s special games.