Green Grass & Prowess
Somehow, I don't talk about Softy in this one.
Before we can really dig ourselves into a true preview of Hate Week’s main event, we must remind ourselves that it is mid-November, and things are getting Newsy™.
First, the Oregon Ducks are 6th in the latest College Football Playoff rankings.
Cool. Great. Sweet. Wonderful.
But the Ducks can only control what they control, and the man at the controls had a few pressing questions to answer this week.
As is tradition, Auburn just fired their head coach, and since they feel like they got the short end of the stick in the Ashford-for-Nix trade, it seems like their fan websites couldn’t help but covet a southern head coach from all the way across the country.
Unfounded rumors about Lanning-to-Auburn swirled despite the fact that there is a truly righteous man from Liberty, Virginia (that’s where they play, right?) that is a shoe-in for the War Eagle gig.
Still, Dan Lanning minced no words in his commitment to his current team:
“The grass is not always greener. The grass is damn green in Eugene. I want to be here in Eugene for as long as Eugene will have me.”
He also mentioned that he thinks, “history maybe shows that this is a great place to be and not a great place to leave,” which I think can probably be interpreted by folks in Miami and Tallahassee in a myriad of ways.
Could Lanning leave for another job someday? Absolutely. That’s the nature of the sport. But we have no earthly reason to believe he’d be the type to jump ship so soon.
And the last bit of news this week comes to us in honor of Washington being led by a cadre of Fresno State coaches.
Dan Patrick got on his radio show and tried to tell the Back Row that even more of the Mountain West was invading the Pac-12, and that San Diego State was allegedly being announced as an expansion team, “as early as this week,” per Patrick.
Now, SDSU could eventually be added to the conference, but our buddy Jon Wilner assures me that a whole lot of other business has to be taken care of first.
Suck it, Back Row.
Poor Kalen DeBoer though, I think that Arizona State loss might have made him long for the halcyon days of The G5. The Aztecs would have made him feel right at home.
But now that the color of the grass in Eugene has been adequately identified, let’s talk about this Husky game.
Washington’s main strength is absolutely their offense.
Brock Huard will spend the Fox pregame show with the same angle that everyone and their momma will be parroting:
“Washington can move the ball, particularly through the air with quarterback Michael Penix Jr., and Oregon’s defensive secondary has proven to be vulnerable throughout the year.”
And to his credit, Michael Penix leads the entire country in passing yards. That’s truly impressive. I thought Penix would be good, but I had no expectation that he would be September Heisman-level good.
But behind that impressive talking point about being #1 in yards, lies a dirty secret about Penix’s actual status as a relatively inefficient QB who is—at the very least—the second best signal caller (on the second-best offense) that the Ducks have faced this season.
The Huskies are 10th in the nation in total offense, gaining over 495 on average, but UCLA, who the Ducks already thoroughly defeated, ranks in at 5th in the country.
And the Bruin’s Dorian Thompson-Robinson is far more consistent and is a serious threat all over the field when compared to the otherwise stationary, pocket passing tendencies of Big Penix Energy.
DTR is third in the country in completion percentage (71.7%) and 10th in passing efficiency (165.12), while Penix is all the way down at 34th (66.5%) and 32nd (152.78), respectively.
Something else that is buried beneath Washington’s seemingly impressive offensive numbers is a truly anemic rushing attack. The Huskies are an abysmal 99th on the ground averaging just over 125 ypg.
As we know, a huge part of UCLA’s ability to even relatively hang with Oregon was thanks to Zach Charbonnet 152 yards on the ground and their 7th-ranked run game.
The Huskies are shakily one-dimensional, and even if they bust out a few big pass plays with bombs from Penix, they will quickly learn that you can’t play the same note over and over again when you’re sharing the stage with the Jerry Garcia of offenses.
It’s keep up or shut up.
And when it comes to keeping up, you can expect that Bo Nix—who is literally number one in the country in touchdowns and comp % in his own right—and Dillingham dynamism will just be too much for an Okay™ Husky defense—especially their suspect secondary that Oregon State was too inept to take advantage of last week, despite the repeated wide open opportunities.
45-27, Lightning Yellow.
Go Ducks.