http://bleacherreport.com/articles/65809-willinghams-scorched-earth-aftermath-of-bad-recruiting-classes-for-uw

But here’s my case for Mike Riley (even though he’s only off to a 2-3 start this season).  He’s one of the most under-rated coaches in the country in my opinion.  He’s the coach of the second-tier program in Oregon, and even with all of Nike’s and Phil Knight’s money flowing to the Ducks, the two teams have the same number of wins from the five seasons of 2003-2007.  However, Mike Riley does this with considerably less talent.  He also has a knack for finding good playmakers that other major schools usually overlook (see Rodger, James and Rodgers, Jacquizz).  But just think of what he could do at Washington, without having to take second billing to another in-state school, but he still has experience beating the Ducks.

“It is possible,” Willingham said. “I can’t tell you where right now. But he is a tremendous athlete, and the ability to play five, six, seven positions exists.”

These are the 7 positions I want to see Jake Locker play (in no particular order):

1. Kicker
2. Center
3. Nose Tackle
4. Punter
5. Fullback
6. Left Tackle
7. Free Safety

This weekend I went to the Stanford game, and the good thing about two teams with bad defenses is that there will be a lot of scoring.  That’s what we had this weekend, but unfortunatly that’s about the only good thing that I can think of right now.

The next three games are going to be huge for the Huskies, with matches against Arizona, Oregon State, and Notre Dame.  Now they have to do it without Jake Locker at quarterback.  That might not be entirely a bad thing, considering Locker has a hard time completing a pass over 20 yards.  What would be truly exciting is if he came back with a broken arm to play another position.

Also, Lane Kiffin finally got fired by the Raiders, so I say the Huskies make a play for him

I guess the jury is still out on how good of a head coach he is, but I think it would be pretty easy to sum up his Raider tenure as a year with an awful team and a psychotic owner.  You can’t really use this experience as a basis to know how good of a head coach he is.  However, we do know that Pete Carroll sucked as an NFL head coach, and things have been working out pretty well for USC lately. 

Here’s an excerpt from his bio on the Raider website:

In 2005, he was promoted to offensive and recruiting coordinator while continuing as the wide receivers coach. In Kiffin’s three years as recruiting coordinator at USC, the Trojans had the No. 1-ranked recruiting class in college football every year. Under Kiffin’s leadership in 2006, the Trojans finished first in the Pac-10 in passing efficiency by averaging 142.8 yards per game, produced two, 1,000-yard receivers (Dwayne Jarrett — 1,105, Steve Smith — 1,083) and a 3,000-yard passer (John David Booty — 3,347).

If he can use his recruiting prowess to get some athletes of that caliber to Seattle, things could look pretty good for the Huskies in the future.

I previously quoted another blog stating that there was a possibility that Ty might be gone in the bye week after Oklahoma.  Now, I’m no Ty apologist, but that’s clearly wrong now that I’ve thought about it a bit more and watched the BYU game.  It was a completely different team that showed up this Saturday as opposed to at Oregon.  As usual, Locker was sweet, but the coaching staff was able to avoid going full retard and changed their defense, and the rest of the team played well too.  Unless Oklahoma seriously embarasses the Huskies, or Ty pulls a Woody Hayes, Ty will be the coach for at least 4 more games, and here is why: (1) The next 3 games are complete unknowns and will truly be indicators for the program: Stanford, Arizona, and Oregon State.  With a couple bye weeks and against teams closer in ability to Washington, how are those going to play out?  (2) Following those three games is a matchup with his ex-employer, Notre Dame.  For all sorts of schadenfreude reasons, this game has to occur.  First of all, the rest of the football fans and self-righteous journalists want to see Ty have a shot at beating the racist ND institution*.  Second of all, all the self-righteous ND fans want to see Ty pummeled into the ground at the hands of Notre Dame so they can prove he is a bad coach.  It’s a win-win situation!  If ND wins, then Ty most likely really is done in Seattle (if he’s smart, he resigns before playing USC the following week) and Husky fans can begin the recruitment of Chip Kelly, who would turn Locker into a Heisman winner.  If Washington wins, Ty might have saved his job, and ND fans can begin the recruitment of Skip Holtz to replace Weis.

*I know sarcasm doesn’t come out well in writing, so I just want the disclaimer that my tongue is planted firmly in cheek right now.  I went to ND for all three of Ty’s seasons there, and in no way do I believe it is a racist school.  I also think a lot of  ND fans (myself included) get too carried away with football, so some have this pentup hate for Ty for whatever reason, so I’m not actually in the second camp either who wants to see him fail.  My simple opinion is that he’s a bad head coach, so the failing is a given, and I don’t want it to be at a school for which I am a fan.

15 yards, right there.

So the sports reporting world was very quick to jump all over the unfortunate events of the last 8 seconds of the BYU-Washington game last weekend.  In case you were living under a rock the past few days, here is how it went down:

Lots of bloggers and journalists have reported on this ad nauseum, so I will try not to repeat much.  Most are either sympathetic to Locker’s emotions, decrying the idiocy of the referees, or merely pointing out the inevitable ending of a game coached by Tyrone Willingham as detailed in my previous post.

It brings me great pains to say that my favorite article on the matter came from ESPN, where Jim Caple wrote much better than I could on the matter.  I won’t get too mad at the refs as I was initially, as I think the referees were put in the unenviable position of being asked to focus on this rule prior to the season, and to the letter of the law, there is no denying that Jake Locker’s actions violated Article 2c in section 9-2 of the rules, which state that “The player in possession immediately must return the ball to an official or leave it near the dead-ball spot…” and specifically prohibits “throwing the ball high into the air.”

So my issue is taken up with the rule itself, which I believe will be overturned in the off-season (not to mention not called as literally for the rest of the season).  As Caple points out, there is a huge discrepency in the actions of a jubilant celebration such as Locker’s and any sort of taunting of an oppenent that is truly unsportsmanlike.  However, both result in the same devastating 15 yard penalty.  The rule change, which will be dubbed the “Jake Locker Rule” (I invented that just now), should make for allowances to the referee to make judgement calls whether or not a celebration is excessive and/or unsportsmanlike.  I realize some might feel like this is a slippery slope, but usually it is obvious when a celebration is taunting or choreographed.  A potentially game tying score at home as time almost expires against a top-20 team, when the runner tosses the ball into the air to hug some teammates is obviously not something that the rules should allow to be penalized.

The great irony is that Mike Bellotti, coach of the rival Oregon Ducks, is the chairman of the NCAA Football Rules Committee until next September.  Let’s hope that he and others do the right thing.

W is for Water. The most-wasted resource in the United States is water. The second is Jake Locker, a heroic player with talent shooting from every seam of his being.

Where does the Ty Willingham factor come into the debacled finale of the BYU/Washington game? Not in the final celebration penalty, on which the universe has come to complete agreement. (Complete and total crap, and interventionist officiating at its ticky-tackiest worst.) The Willingham factor comes in the fact that, once it happened, everyone watching knew in their gut that the extra point was blocked, because that’s just what seems to happen to Ty Willingham’s teams in his post-Stanford career: improbable losses in the clutch due to some malaise or neglect at the margins. And in a game of margins, those add up to long-term success or, in Willingham’s case at Washington, failure.

Washington quarterback Jake Locker (10) runs past BYU linebacker Coleby Clawson (41) for a touchdown in the first quarter of an NCAA college football game Saturday, Sept. 6, 2008, at Husky Stadium in Seattle. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

More info coming soon when I analyze the game tape, but a heartbreaking loss @ home to the BYU Cougars.  Jake Locker tried as hard as he could to lead the Huskies to victory, scoring a potential game-tying touchdown with 2 seconds left, but got called for a unsportsmanlike celebration penalty, which was totally bogus, and the next play was a blocked PAT for the Cougar win.

On the bright side, the coaching staff got the team playing better after an embarrassing loss to the Ducks, and they lined up in a 4-3 defense.  That was a very refreshing change from last week.

More info coming later when I get home from Seattle, and as we look forward to the game against the Oklahoma Sooners.

Jake Locker vs. Ohio State '07

…that is the question for me this weekend.  One thing I know for certain is that I’m taking the train from Portland to Seattle this weekend, but do I actually want to go to the BYU-UW game?

UW has already shown its incredible ineptitude against the pre-season AP #21 team in Oregon, and now it will be going against the pre-season #16 team.  BYU has a much more experienced squad and aspirations of an undefeated party to crash the BCS party.  Luckily for UW, I have to think the Oregon’s defense is much better than BYU’s, so perhaps the Huskies can generate some sort of running game that isn’t based around Jake Locker scrambling.

So my options at this point are to either go to the UW game at noon, or to watch the Notre Dame season opener on TV at 12:30.  I think at this point, I’m leaning towards heading to Montlake to tailgate in the morning, then head to a locale where I can watch both games on TV.  Unless of course, UW has an option as awesome as Eugene’s Moshofsky Center (after the jump).  Perhaps I could watch the kickoff of the Huskies in person, and by the time ND kicks off a 1/2-hour later, BYU should have put the game should be out of reach.

One final note about last weekend’s game: At Oregon (and from what I hear, many college stadiums), you can leave the game at halftime and are granted re-entry.  This concept is entirely foreign to my experience in college.  To appease the part of the crowd that would enjoy leaving the game at halftime to enjoy an adult beverage or four, Oregon’s indoor practice facility, the Moshofsky Center, is immediately next to Autzen Stadium.  The entire south wall becomes a bar where one can purchase his or her favorite domestic beer or microbrew.  On the north wall, there is a scoreboard synchronized with the stadium’s and tons of TVs set up to watch the game if one wanted to stay in there and keep drinking instead of walking 30 seconds back to the stadium.  Now that I think about it, it’s actually pretty great that I didn’t have this option in college, as I probably would not have seen the second half of many games in person.

Moshofsky Center at halftime from my phone. Besides all the Duck fans, it is a pretty nice amenity.