Auburndawg's Mid Term Report Card

Offense

We are averaging over 30 points a game. We’ve moved the ball against everyone. We are balanced. Sankey is having one of the greatest seasons in Husky history. And yet the offense goes through stretches where we just flounder, especially throwing the ball. There have been too many sloppy penalties. Many here want to blame the O-line, but Price is the biggest problem. Over and over again he holds the ball too long because he just doesn’t trust his reads. He is afraid of interceptions and he knows it: "I needed to trust my eyes and trust my reads. I think I was a bit too cautious at times, just not wanting to lose momentum, because I knew if I turned it over, that's what Oregon does, they feed off of it." Price is playing better than he did last year, but for the offense to improve in the second half he has got to become more confident, hit his back foot, and cut it loose. That will get ASJ and KW more involved.

This offense is good, but it could be great. Grade: B+

Defense

The defense has given up 112 points in the first half. Anything under 250 points in a season and you are in Don James/Lambo territory. This defense has been outstanding – until yesterday. We controlled Oregon’s running game and got destroyed by the pass. It looked like Wilcox was scheming to stop the run and make Mariotta beat us with his arm, and he did. We gave a long TD pass, and long pass plays on all of their scoring drives. We didn’t blitz, and we left guys open, the worst of all possible worlds. Yeah, Oregon is great. But truly great defenses have held that offense down, we didn’t.

Yesterday sucked. But they have been so good the other 5 games it’s hard to mark them down too much. Grade: A-

Specials Teams

There are things to like. A blocked FG. A fake punt. No missed FGs. Good punting. But kick off coverage has been a disaster and likely cost us the Stanford game. You can’t let special teams cost you a game. Sark has got to get this fixed.
Grade: C-

Sark

The question for this program remains, is Sark the guy to get Washington all the way back? The long term objective, as Sark says over and over again, is to compete for national championships and Rose Bowls. I don’t care how good Oregon is, Sark’s job is to beat them. Three games into conference play and we are out of the race for the conference championship. That’s disappointing. (and BTW, please stop throwing the ball on 1st and goal!!)

But the short term objective is to show significant improvement and get beyond 7-6/5-4 mediocrity. It seems that we are doing that, but now Sark needs to prove it. This can still be a very successful season, but that means we now need to win out, or at most, drop one more league game and win the bowl game. Is 6-3 in league really a significant step up from 5-4? Maybe, if we win the bowl game. If we are who we think we are this year, running the table from here out is not an unreasonable expectation, but 10 wins now is the minimum to declare that things are definitely getting better.

This team, and this head coach has done the minimum of what was expected of it so far, beat 4 mediocre teams, and lose to two elite teams. Grade: B. Assignment for the second half: get to 10 wins.