A Reser Stadium-record crowd of 45,629 saw what was one of the strangest games I’ve seen in a long time.
Between Locker’s injury, the ejections, turnovers, and what looked like a blown call that gave Washington a final shot, it was just weird all around.
The good news for Washington, of course, is that Locker was out of the hospital and back with his team before the game ended. The bad is that the Huskies no longer have a shot at a bowl game.
Tyrone Willingham called Locker’s injury a neck sprain, and said it’s still way too early to know what the long-term prognosis will be.
Speaking of weird, I think I mentioned this on the blog already, but Alexis Serna is now 18 for 18 on field-goal attempts against the Huskies, including a five-for-five night tonight. Yvenson Bernard, who missed last week’s game with a shoulder injury, had a solid return, rushing for 149 yards.
Carl Bonnell did a nice job in place of Locker after struggling early. He finished with 233 yards and two touchdowns without an interception.
One of the bright spots on a down night for the Huskies was the play of Curtis Shaw. The freshman tailback turned receiver caught four passes for 46 yards.
After putting up big numbers in recent games, Washington’s offense was less productive, which makes sense given the quality of the opponent and the fact that Locker missed more than half of the game. Washington ended the game with 334 yards of total offense. Not bad, but not quite as good as they’ve been recently. That’s actually six more yards than the Beavers managed.
A few quotes from the game:
Offensive coordinator Tim Lappano on the play of Curtis Shaw:
“Curtis Shaw has found a home. I think he’s going to give us that down-field stretch that we need. There’s nothing like 10.4 hundred meters.”
Lappano on the final drive.
“I wish I would have run it now on third and two… On the last play, they gambled and they won. We had two guys open for touchdowns, the corners cheated and tried to drive on the quick outs [Bonnell] was just trying to get the first down and look inside. Their backers were playing inside leverage on us, and he was just trying to fit it in there and they made the play on it, so that was tough. But I wish on third down that I would have run the football. I wish I would have done that.”
Senior defensive tackle summed the night up well, so we’ll leave you with this:
“It was a total heartbreaker man. It’s tough to see one of your leaders, one of your friends, and one of the best players on the football team go down like that. And it’s scary.
I thought we battled. It’s totally crushing to be a senior on this team knowing that we can’t finish over .500. It hurts pretty bad.
Jake’s one of the toughest guys on the football team, and he’s one of the toughest guys I’ve been around. I’ve got a lot of respect for that guy and I knew that no matter what it was, he was going to be just fine. But a lot of emotion goes through you when you see a guy go off like that. It’s scary, but we were trying to bond together and play good football the rest of the way.”
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