By Christian Caple
The News Tribune
SEATTLE — There are fewer than 2,000 tickets remaining for Friday night’s game between the No. 10 Washington Huskies and No. 7 Stanford Cardinal, a matchup the UW hopes will entice the first sellout at Husky Stadium since 2013.
It’s a big game with Pac-12 North title implications. It will be televised nationally by ESPN.
Huskies coach Chris Petersen said he wishes it were on a Saturday.
“Any time you don’t play on Saturday … it is a pain,” Petersen said Monday. “It definitely takes you out of your rhythm, your routine and all those type of things, for sure.”
That’s especially true for the Huskies this week, because they played a 7:30 p.m. game in Tucson, Arizona, on Saturday, and their charter flight didn’t land back in Seattle until about 4 a.m.
Petersen said most of the coaching staff watched film on the plane, then went home and tried to get some sleep before meetings later that day.
The team returned to practice Monday, will practice at 3 p.m. Tuesday and then practice in the morning on Wednesday, the first day of fall quarter classes at UW. The Huskies typically practice at about 8:30 a.m. when school is in session.
Making matters more difficult, Petersen said, is that UW just faced an Arizona team that runs an up-tempo spread offense, and now has a shorter amount of time than usual to prepare for a Stanford offense that prefers to grind out yardage on the ground, run the clock and bash its opponents with formations that feature six or seven offensive linemen, or multiple tight ends.
“Seven years ago,” Petersen said, “you see a spread team or something, it’s like, ‘Oh, what is this?’ So now the table has turned, and you don’t see this heavy personnel group, multiple-linemen, fullback in the game all the time. You don’t get a lot of reps against that. Now we have a shorter week, so it’ll be a challenge to get ready for.”
Of course, Washington’s short week won’t be quite as hectic as Stanford’s. The Cardinal played a 5 p.m. game at UCLA in Pasadena on Saturday, returned home that night, and must prepare for this week’s game in the same amount of time as Washington – but also work in a flight from the Bay Area to Seattle on Thursday.
Oregon time set
After three consecutive night games, Washington gets a reprieve when it visits Oregon for an Oct. 8 game at Autzen Stadium in Eugene.
That game will kickoff at 4:30 p.m. and air on FOX, the league announced Monday.
Extra points
Petersen said he isn’t concerned about senior kicker Cameron Van Winkle, who entered the season as the most accurate field-goal kicker in school history but missed both of his attempts at Arizona and is just 3-for-6 through the Huskies’ first four games. “Cam’s a good kicker. Just missed the one and then the other one, I don’t know. He’ll get it straightened out, though. But he’s been pretty solid all of fall camp, all practices and all those type of things. He’ll be back in there.” … Jake Browning earned praise from his teammates for laying a block that knocked an Arizona defender to the ground and sprung receiver John Ross for a 32-yard touchdown run on a reverse in the first half of Saturday’s game. Browning said afterward that he didn’t think it was all that impressive. Said Petersen: “I think Jake said it best: The expectations and standards for quarterbacks blocking are so low that if you do anything, give a guy a little bit of a shoulder, it’s like a bone-crushing hit. I don’t really think it was that. But it was good.”
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