SEATTLE — The good news for the Washington Huskies was that, despite a few head-scratching coaching decisions and an anemic offensive performance, they had the ball with a short field and plenty of time left to tie the game.
The bad news? The offense had the ball.
After an inconsistent opening four games against weak competition, Chris Petersen’s Huskies faced by far their biggest test to date in the form of Stanford on Saturday, and while Washington’s defense more than held up its end of the bargain, the offense showed in a 20-13 loss that it still has a long ways to go.
“We knew it was going to be tough,” UW offensive coordinator Jonathan Smith said, “but we didn’t know it was going to be this tough.”
And before we go piling on Washington’s offense and the performance of sophomore quarterback Cyler Miles, it’s worth remembering that Stanford has one of the country’s top defenses — the Cardinal hasn’t allowed more than 20 points in 12 straight games and it’s been 27 in a row since an opponent scored 30 — and that the Huskies are still adjusting to a new coach’s system with an inexperienced quarterback leading the way. Even so, this was pretty bad.
Washington’s 179 total yards and 98 passing yards were both program lows since a 41-0 loss to Stanford in 2010, and while Miles’ second-quarter touchdown pass to Jaydon Mickens was a thing of beauty, that drive was aided by 35 yards worth of Stanford penalties. Washington’s only other score came via a ridiculous individual effort by linebacker Shaq Thompson, who forced a fumble, recovered it and returned it for a touchdown. Left to its own devices, Washington’s offense might not have scored Saturday.
“On offense, we’ve got to go back to the drawing board and try to get our quarterback some answers for sure,” Petersen said. “It usually starts in the running game, we’ve got to be able to run the ball better, then we’ve got to figure out what we have to do to move the ball down the field throwing it a little bit.”
Really, it’s hard to know for sure where to start because so little went well on offense. The Huskies averaged just 2.1 yards per rush, they couldn’t protect Miles without committing extra blockers to the effort — he was sacked four times — and Miles himself struggled, completing just 15 of 29 passes while, by his own admission, bailing on the pocket too early at times.
“I tip my hat to them,” Miles said of the Stanford defenders. “That’s a really great defense, a great front seven. At times the pressure did get to us, which we’ve got to clean up, but at the end of the day it’s about us improving as an offense.
“There might have been a couple of times I could have hung in the pocket and continued to make reads instead of getting out of there. That’s just something I’ve got to continue to work on.”
Miles performance, and Jeff Lindquist’s struggles in his one start against Hawaii, makes it fair to wonder if the Huskies will have reliable quarterback play at any point this season, but realistically those are the two options Petersen has to work with going forward, even if he couldn’t help but scoff a bit at a question asking how happy he was with Miles’ play.
“Happy with him? Yeah, it’s uh, yeah, we’ve got some work to do there,” Petersen said. “I’ve got to put the tape on before we really say exactly what’s going on there.”
That tape will show what the stats and scoreboard showed — Washington’s offense was not good on Saturday. And because the offense struggled so badly against a very good defense, Petersen talked himself into some bold late-game decisions that ended up compounding the offensive problems.
First, Petersen elected to call for a fake punt on fourth-and-9 near midfield, giving Stanford a short field that turned into the game-winning touchdown. Then after the ensuing kickoff went out of bounds, Petersen, so eager to get the ball into the hands of playmaker John Ross, who had just three catches for 16 yards, elected to have Stanford re-kick rather than taking the ball at the 35-yard line. The result was a net-loss of 19 yards after Ross was tackled at the 16.
Both of those decisions were desperate ones that a good coach like Petersen should be able to avoid, but those lapses in judgment are what his offense drove him to Saturday.
“We were trying to get something going however we could,” Petersen said. “… We were doing whatever we could do to try to create something.”
Again, the Huskies are still growing, particularly on offense, and they probably won’t see a defense as good as Stanford’s again, but what was clear Saturday was that, as Smith put it, “we’re not there yet.”
Herald Writer John Boyle: jboyle@heraldnet.com.
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