Dawgs are limping to finish

We hadn’t seen this Husky team this year. Sure, we’d seen them disappointed, frustrated, upset. But we hadn’t really seen them beaten.

Until Saturday.

During the Oregon game and after the game, it was clear this was a Washington football team clinging by its fingertips to the edge of the cliff, and slowly slipping off.

The Huskies are beaten up physically, mentally and emotionally. The words are the same, of course. They still believe they can make a bowl game, they can finish the season strong, they can turn things around and end on a high note.

But the words behind the words tell a different story.

Maybe Washington will indeed win its last two games. Certainly it should handle Stanford at home next week. But the swagger and confidence that this team had in September is now history. In its place is a team that says one thing with its mouth, but an entirely different thing with its eyes.

Look closely, and you see a team hurting. Hurting physically, to be sure. This has been a long season, and the Huskies do not have a bye to recover a bit. For a team that already had little depth, that was a death sentence. There was no way Washington could survive an entire season as thin as it was at most positions, and that’s proven to be the case.

But just as pained physically as the Huskies are, they are in just as much emotional turmoil. And how could they not be? At one time, they were looking at a 4-1 start, were the talk of the Pacific-10 and generating some positive national buzz. They were two wins away from a bowl game with seven still to play. It was an amazing turnaround.

And then the bottom fell out.

Injuries started to mount up. Wins started to turn into losses. Questions sprang up. Was the start an illusion? Was this team really a bowl team?

The close losses in October – amounting to four losses by a combined 26 points – had to be a huge hit psychologically. It’s tough to see that you aren’t just quite good enough. In some sense, it’s better to be dominated than to be edged out. One-sided losses leave no doubt; you simply aren’t good enough. Close losses, though, leave you questioning what you could do different, if you just got lucky, if you’re really good enough to compete with those top teams.

For a team on such a high after getting wins over Arizona and UCLA, those are tough questions to face. To have to do it four times, well, you can see why this team doesn’t appear to be the same one that had started to capture the city’s attention.

Can the Huskies get that back? It’s going to take a lot. Winning the last two games would definitely help. Finishing 6-6 would be a huge jump for a team coming off three wins in two years. But being that it would come at the end of the season would make it tough to carry on any momentum to next season.

Six wins would be a success for this team, but what this team really needs is to somehow get into a bowl game. Is it likely to happen? No. But a collapse here or there and a win over Washington State and the Apple Cup, and who knows?

A bowl spot would be that tangible victory that this team could really fall back on. It could say, “Look what we went through. A grueling schedule, losing our leader and best player, losing four heart-breakers in four weeks, and we still found a way to reach a bowl.”

That would show the returning players that if they can accomplish that with a team not really built for a great deal of success, what could they get done when Tyrone Willingham has a couple years to recruit?

That would start building that winning attitude that this program has lacked for so long. It’s an attitude we saw in the early months of this season, but that may have been a faade, a case of a team getting a whiff of the new car smell only to later realize that the car may look and smell good, but in reality it has pretty bad gas mileage and isn’t built for the long haul.

But if this season turns into a successful test drive, next year’s model of the Huskies might be the one that could combine the early physical appeal with the long lasting durability.