Sunday, September 17, 2017

Huskies are 3-0, Start Conference Play Next Week

Last night the University of Washington Huskies defeated the Fresno State Bulldogs by a score of 48-16 at Husky Stadium. This is the Huskies' last non-conference game.

Fresno State is an FBS team (in the Mountain West Conference) unlike last week's opponent, Montana.

Didn't seem to matter. For the first half, the Huskies dominated. Fresno was able to make a touchdown and the Dawg's place kicker missed a point after touchdown, but by the end of the half the score was 41-7. One of those touchdowns was a Dante Pettis punt return tying him for the NCAA record for punts returned for a touchdown and games in a row (three) with a punt return for a touchdown. If he can get a punt return to a touchdown next week, he'll break both records.

Early in the third quarter the Huskies scored again. It was the last time they would score as starting quarterback Jake Browning was taken out and second stringers went in. The Huskies never scored again. Fresno got three field goals for the rest of the game.

At one point it was 4th and goal for the Huskies and Coach Chris Petersen decided to go for it and the first stringer Bulldogs were able to stop the second stringer Huskies. If they'd simply done a field goal, instead, the Huskies would have had 51 points to end the game. Which, to me, would have been more impressive for the AP poll voters.

The game was pretty boring and not very exciting once the second-stringers were put in.

Next week the Huskies travel to Boulder to take on the University of Colorado Buffaloes. This is being billed as a replay of last year's Pac-12 championship game. But the Buffs aren't nearly as good as they were last year judging from the AP rankings. I think their star quarterback graduated and he carried the team a lot last year.

The Buff are 3-0, also, so one of these teams are going to come out of the game with their first loss. Let's hope it's Colorado.

And, ironically, right now the Washington State Cougars are on top of the Pac-12 North because they are the only team in the North Division with a conference win (they beat Oregon State last night). One sad thing about that game was the OSU quarterback, Jake Luton, took a big hit and was knocked unconscious. He was carted off the field and taken to a hospital. The latest news is that he was discharged from the hospital last night. No word on what injury he suffered. But it looked bad.

The Polls

The AP Top 25 Football poll comes out on Sunday morning at 2:00 PM Eastern Time (except for the first week of college football, it comes out on Tuesday after Labor Day).

Washington dropped one from #6 to #7 (should have gotten that field goal, I tell ya).

USC dropped one to #5 after their triple-overtime win over Texas.

Washington State climbed to #18.  Utah (#23) and Oregon (#24 and boo hiss) both made it onto the two 25 this week. That means five Pac-12 teams are ranked, or almost half the conference.

UCLA lost to Memphis yesterday and that dropped them out of the poll (they were #25 last week).

Stanford also dropped off the poll from #19 last week after losing to San Diego State (who are now at 22 after not being ranked).



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