Husky head coach Jedd Fisch, like USC’s Lincoln Riley, finished the year with a regular season record of 6-6 after a not even close 49-21 loss at Eugene to the nations No. 1 team, now 12-0 overall and 9-0 in conference. You have to go all the way back to 2010 and the blur offense days of Chip Kelly to find another Oregon team that was undefeated in the regular season. Also like Riley, Fisch decided to switch up quarterbacks and started his freshman in this one—Demond Williams Jr. As it turned out, like the Trojans, the Huskies weakness in the trenches—a problem all year—was exposed and taken advantage of. With an attack that was about as balanced as it gets, 236 yards in the air and 226 yards on the ground while also recording 10 sacks and 16 tackles for loss on the other side of the ball, Oregon looks very much like last year’s Michigan national champion—maybe even better.
Oregon got the ball to start and were in the end zone 9 plays and 71 yards later to go up 7-0 on a Noah Whittington 9 yard TD run. Washington would be deep in the Oregon red zone 9 plays later themselves, but on 4th and 5 at the Oregon 8 yard line they sent in their place kicker Grady Gross who connected on a 26 yard field goal to make it a 7-3 game. The Ducks were held to a three-and-out on their next possession and then fumbled on the one after that which led to another Grady Gross field goal just four plays later—this one from 41 yards to get the Huskies within one point at 7-6.
But that’s as close as it got with the Ducks reeling off back-to-back-to-back touchdowns with the second one aided by a Washington fumble in their own red zone leading to a score just two plays later. The Huskies would add a touchdown and two-point conversion of their own with less than a minute left in the half to make it a 28-14 game at the break. The Ducks would start the second half right where they left off in the first with back-to-back-to-back touchdowns while holding the Huskies scoreless to go up 49-14 with just five minutes left in the game. Williams would lead a final 9 play 75 yard march downfield for the Huskies which would result in a TD on his 28 yard pass to Giles Jackson. But adding another seven points still didn’t make this one look close.
As Mike Vorel wrote in his column about the game for the Seattle Times; “After outlasting Oregon for a 34-31 win in last December’s Pac-12 championship game, Dillon Johnson—the Huskies’ junior running back and Mississippi State transfer—said UW did so because ‘we were the most physical team.’ The statistics supported that assertion . . . In [this year’s] 49-21 steamrolling inside Autzen Stadium, No. 1 Oregon dominated UW on both lines of scrimmage. The undefeated Ducks rolled for 226 rushing yards, six yards per carry and five touchdowns, while failing to surrender a single sack. On the other side, they held the Huskies to 43 rushing yards and 1.2 yards per carry, while tying a program record with 10 sacks of true freshman quarterback Demond Williams Jr. Jonah Coleman—a standout junior running back, same as Johnson—entered the day with 1,008 rushing yards, 5.8 yards per carry and nine rushing scores … and mustered a mere three yards on 11 carries. It wasn’t because the 5-foot-9, 229-pound junior left his ability at the border. It was because Washington can’t compete with elite opponents on either line of scrimmage.”
The next time we’ll see the Huskies is Saturday, August 30th, hosting the Colorado State Rams. With Andy Yamashita reporting in Sunday’s edition of the Seattle Times that Zac Stascausky, a 6’ 6” 275 pound offensive tackle from Portland has decommitted from Washington to play for the Ducks—to go along with a tight end we lost after the loss to Penn State—I’m not hopeful. Maybe if I just click my heels three times and repeat over and over; “There’s no conference like the PAC-12,” everything would be back in place, except for a new and very lucrative media deal.