UW FOOTBALL: Injured Huskies get practice timeout

Published 11:55 pm Saturday, August 16, 2008

SEATTLE — It seems they’re running out of stationary bikes at Husky Stadium.

As most of the team prepared for practice Saturday afternoon, injured Washington football players Casey Bulyca, Jordan White-Frisbee, Victor Aiyewa and T.J. Poe pedaled away on the four bikes on the stadium track, while Byron Davenport and Desmond Davis waited their turns.

Across the stadium, a handful of players walked or jogged the stadium stairs because they too were too dinged up to practice. Quarterback Jake Locker was also on the sideline, missing his eighth day of practice since injuring his hamstring.

But while it may seem that this team has sustained more than its share of injuries two weeks into fall camp, Washington coach Tyrone Willingham doesn’t seem alarmed.

“It’s just the stuff that happens,” Willingham said. “Obviously we have some significant ones. When you’ve got your quarterback in there, that’s significant, but it’s still the same things that are happening.” Willingham said he went back and looked at his injury report for this time last year, and that the numbers were very similar.

“You know what’s amazing?” he said. “We’ve got two more guys on our injury list than we had last year at this time, that’s it. Now we have probably a few more significant names then we had a year ago, but it’s the same process that you end up with every year. At some point, you’re going to have some injuries if you’re banging around, if you’re moving around and doing things.”

The Huskies scrimmaged on the second Saturday of camp last year, and that practice was open to media and the public. According to reports from that practice, eight players were held out of the scrimmage because of injuries.

During the start of Saturday’s practice, 14 players—Locker, Poe, White-Frisbee, Bulyca, Aiyewa, Davenport, Davis, Michael Gottlieb, Brandon Johnson, Brandon Yakaboski, Matt Sedillo, Devin Aguilar, Anthony Gobern and Juan Garcia, who was not at the portion of practice open to the media—were not in full pads to start practice. It’s unclear, however, how many of those players would be considered injured by Willingham, and how many are being held out as a precaution, or for that matter, how many players on Willingham’s injury report last year might have participated in that Saturday scrimmage.

Willingham said that, as of now, only walk-on linebacker T.J. Poe is for sure out against Oregon, though it seems certain that freshman cornerback Anthony Gobern, who had shoulder surgery this week, is also out an extended period.

One vote for Washington: Fresh off a 4-9 season, the Huskies somehow garnered a point in the preseason AP poll that was released Saturday.

That single vote came from Joe Giglio of the Raleigh News and Observer, who voted the Huskies No. 25. For the record, Giglio is not a UW grad, nor is he from the state (he went to N.C. State and is from New Jersey).

Giglio cited, via email, four reasons for voting for the Huskies, the first being quarterback Jake Locker. He said he felt the Huskies were better than their record, losing a lot of close games to good teams like USC and Hawaii. Giglio also thinks the Pac-10 will be down this year, while the Huskies are getting better, and noted that Notre Dame played in a BCS Bowl game in 2005 in what would have been Willingham’s fourth year. Charlie Weis coached that team, but it was made up of Willingham’s players.

Happy in the heat: The Huskies practiced in temperatures approaching 90 degrees for the second straight day Saturday, and as was the case when the weather heated up earlier in camp, coaches welcomed the change.

“I would say that the heat always has some impact on some of the guys, and that’s one of the distractions that you welcome as a coach, because you want your guys to be able to work through it,” Willingham said. “But as you know, it does take a toll working under those conditions when it’s good and hot, that does force you to reach another level.”

Contact Herald Writer John Boyle at jboyle@heraldnet.com. For more on University of Washington sports, check out the Huskies blog at heraldnet.com /huskiesblog