Last night I was on a local start up radio station.  The show runs on AM 1400, and talks about everything local sports relating to local sports.  Reno Mahe and his cousin Strans plus a few local sports writers started the “home team”, as they are called.  The show is hosted by Darnell Dickson from the Daily Herald, and like I said they talk about everything Cougars and sports.  Towards the end of last nights broadcast, a reporter from a UW sports website called into the show.  We all talked about this weeks game, and he dished about what happened last week at Oregon.  Here are a few of the juicy tid-bites he offered:

1. We started out talking about how this is a must win for Coach Tyrone Willingham.  Ryan, the reporter, mentioned that if Willingham loses to a Mountain West team at home, it won’t be long until he is canned.  Well UW athletic director, get the firing squad locked and loaded.
2. We also talked about Jack Locker and how he didn’t quite look 100% against the Ducks.  All of the Huskies hopes and dreams are riding on this guys shoulders.  He is their offense and with his hamstring not fully recovered from an August pull, it put a damper on the running game.  Forcing the Huskies to throw, meant their very young receivers had to carry the work load against a very talented Oregon secondary.
3. It was funny to hear a Washington guy talk about their own team as being one that started to quit towards the end of the Oregon game.  As a player, it is always easy to tell when a teams “will” has been broken and they’ve quit.  You can see when a player just decides to simple play when the ball comes his way and their efforts are half-hearted.  I would imagine this would be one of the worst things to see as a coach.
4. The reporter was worried about our offense and how explosive it is, but Ryan thought that the young receivers might have better success against our secondary.  And there might be some truth to his madness, but I still think the match-up swings our direction.  UNI’s receiving core was supposedly very good, and we did a fair job of bottling them up.  With young receivers, and Jake Lockers questionable accuracy throwing the ball, I think Scott Johnson, Kellen Fowler, David Tafuna, and Brandon Howard will hold up and UW doesn’t have a passing touchdown.

The radio was fun, and they’ve asked me to come back next week.  I’ll be burning through the night to get the scouting report up tomorrow, and I have a few thoughts on the coaching situation at UW.  If you don’t remember…we used to have a little problem that looks similar to the situation in Washington.

August 4, 2008