Huskies are 1-1

I usually do these posts on the Sunday morning after the game on Saturday. But this week I had a family thing Sunday so I'm posting today.

The University of Washington Huskies are now 1-1 with their victory over the University of North Dakota Fighting Sioux Hawks. The Hawks are an FCS team so this is one of those easy non-conference games used to build confidence and get some practice in before playing Pac-12 teams.

I don't know if the Huskies were over-confident but they still didn't play well. North Dakota managed to shut down our running attack so quarterback Jake Browning ended up throwing a lot. At halftime the score was only 0-17. For a top-10 ranked team playing an FCS team, that's a low score. After halftime the Dawgs looked better. But then something interesting happened. With about 10 minutes left in the fourth quarter, Coach Petersen pulled the starters and put in back-up quarterback Jake Haener (a red-shirt freshman). And he and the other back-up players actually played better than the starters. They got two touchdowns and made it look easy. Haener may be next year's starting quarterback and if so, that's good news.

The final score, because of those two late TDs, was 3-45.

Next week, the Dawgs travel to Salt Lake City to take on a tough Utah team. I hope their play is

improved before then or they're going to have problems. At least they shouldn't be over-confident.

Elsewhere in the Pac-12, Stanford beat USC by a score of 3-17. That means Stanford is going to be a tough opponent when we play them later in the year. And we have to beat Stanford if we're going to be the Pac-12 North champions.

In the AP top 25 poll, Washington dropped one space to #10 and Stanford went up one slot to #9. Oregon climbed to #20 and USC dropped to #22. There's no other Pac-12 teams ranked.

UPDATE: I missed Arizona State who, after beating #15 Michigan State, is now ranked at #23.