SEATTLE — Jermaine Kearse wasn’t feeling well late Saturday night.
But it was a cold — not his hands, or even his psyche — that was ailing the star receiver for the University of Washington football team.
Kearse’s six-catch performance against Arizona State was somewhat overshadowed by two dropped passes, and it might have had something to do with him being a bit under the weather — like many of his UW teammates.
But head coach Steve Sarkisian wasn’t giving him a free pass.
“I’m not giving him (the excuse of) that’s why that happened,” the Huskies’ coach said during his weekly press conference Monday afternoon. “I just think he wasn’t able to make a couple of plays.
“That doesn’t mean I don’t love Jermaine Kearse; I love him to death. And that doesn’t mean we’re going to stop throwing the ball to him. He just, unfortunately, didn’t catch it.”
On an offense that returned almost all of its firepower from last season, dropped passes have been the most unwelcome surprise for the 2010 Huskies. And Kearse, with a team-high seven dropped passes this season, seems like the least likely culprit.
After leading UW with 50 receptions and eight touchdowns in 2009, Kearse had established himself as the go-to receiver on an offense that welcomed the return of senior quarterback and once-Heisman hopeful Jake Locker.
But the receiver has been inconsistent in this, his junior year. While UW
he put on an all-time performance with nine receptions for 179 yards and three touchdowns against Syracuse one month ago, Kearse has also had three different games — the opener against BYU, the win over USC 10 days ago and the loss to ASU on Saturday — in which he’s dropped more than one pass. In the past two games, Kearse has dropped an unofficial total of four passes.
Through it all, Locker has continued to have his top receiver’s back.
After Kearse dropped two passes in the win over USC, Locker said: “I trust him. I will throw the ball to him whenever he is open, and he knows that, and I’ll continue to do that.”
After Monday’s practice, Kearse spent extra time catching passes from receivers coach Jimmie Dougherty. A few minutes later, Locker said he hasn’t lost any faith in his receiving corps despite the drops.
“It’s not an expectation they have to drop the ball,” he said. “I have full confidence in them. Like I said last week, (if I) throw it to them again, they’ll catch it.”
Locker didn’t have his best game against the Sun Devils on Saturday, completing 23 of 38 passes for 209 yards. But his statistics could have been a lot better had it not been for at least four dropped passes. The most devastating ones came when Kearse was unable to corral a fourth-down pass from Locker late in the first half and when fullback Austin Sylvester mishandled a ball before getting decked on a third-down throw in the flat during the fourth quarter.
The Huskies now have an unofficial total of 11 drops on the season.
“Nobody wants to be known for dropping the ball, as a receiver,” said senior D’Andre Goodwin, who has not dropped a pass in a game this year but was the only wide receiver available to the media on Monday. “So we spend time after practice doing the JUGS machine. We’re going to get that corrected.
“We’re not really worried about it because we know that we can catch balls. So we’re just going to continue to do what we do.”
As Kearse’s roommate, Goodwin saw first-hand Saturday night how his fellow receiver was affected by the drops. He said Kearse, who has a team-high 28 receptions this season, was able to shake his latest performance off without taking much of a hit to his confidence.
“Jermaine’s a great player,” Goodwin said. “It happens to the best of us. He’ll bounce back.”
Sarkisian said Monday that the coaches aren’t necessarily going to make it an emphasis this week. He’s never really shown much concern for dropped passes — after Saturday’s game, he said “it wasn’t a matter of (Kearse) not trying” — and won’t make a big deal out of it in team meetings this week.
“I’m a big believer in: physical mistakes are going to happen,” Sarkisian said Monday afternoon. “At times, we all trip over a curb. That happens. Although we step on the curbs over and over and over, at times we trip; those things happen.
“As long as fundamentally we’re sound, I don’t make a big deal about it because I think physical mistakes are going to occur. As long as we’re in the right place at the right time. And, unfortunately, if we drop them, we drop them.”
Goodwin expects his teammate’s recent epidemic with drops to be cured in a matter of days.
“He’ll come back, make sure he concentrates and catches the ball, and he’ll be back to himself on Saturday,” Goodwin said.
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