By TED MILLER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
It's better to be lucky than good and therein lies Washington's problem. The Huskies are neither. "We believe we can win," center Brad Vanneman said after the Huskies allowed a victory to slip away last Saturday against Air Force. "But, at times, we feel like we're cursed." Eureka! The Huskies are cursed. How then to properly negotiate with the spirits for a little relief? Someone get the Red Sox on the telephone. Or the California Bears. Conveniently, they're headed to Husky Stadium today. Like Tyrone Willingham, Bears coach Jeff Tedford also took over a program coming off a 1-10 season, only that face plant of a campaign four years ago was merely the worst of five consecutive losing seasons. Unlike Washington, California wasn't a once beautiful home in need of renovation. Berkeley needed to be blown up and rebuilt. At least that's what everyone thought -- everyone other than Tedford. Cal took on Baylor in front of a home crowd of about 27,000 in Tedford's debut -- well less than half capacity at Memorial Stadium -- not unlike the 26,000 who watched Willingham's first game as the Huskies coach at Qwest Field.
Tedford introduced himself to a perennially blase fan base with a double-pass on the first play from scrimmage. It went for a 71-yard touchdown, one of five touchdowns the Bears scored in the first quarter. A team that ranked last in the Pac-10 in scoring in 2001 with 18.3 points per game rolled to a 70-22 victory. As the clock wound down, fans were chanting, "We love Tedford!" Two weeks later, the Bears crushed No. 15 Michigan State for a 3-0 start and earned a national ranking.
Oh, and a week after that they lost to Air Force.
Yet any doubt that Tedford had lifted the curse haunting his program came when Cal visited Husky Stadium and ended 19 years of futility with a 34-27 victory. Now the Golden Bears play in front of 65,000 fans in a stadium scheduled for a massive renovation. They haven't been out of the national rankings since the end of 2003 and were picked second in the Pac-10 this year, despite welcoming back just 11 starters, fewest in the conference. There's no reason that Washington can't duplicate this reversal, and for 3 1/2 quarters against Air Force, it felt like Willingham was dragging the Huskies out of their miasma in his own steady, stolid way. They weren't fancy. They didn't electrify fans with creative trickery or a scoring onslaught. They had better physical talent and they leaned on that with the most conservative of plans: We win if we don't lose it. But they lost it. "We need to be able to make those five or six plays down the stretch that closes the game out," Willingham said. "That is what good teams do."
That can go two ways, though. Making plays means the other team is messing up. One team's brilliance is another's miscue. The Huskies need somebody to throw up all over themselves. They need to watch an opponent fall apart so they don't play every game believing they are fortune's fools. In fact, it's more plausible to assert that some nasty voodoo will strike down an opponent this year than UW playmaking. Some teams achieve victories, but the Huskies need somebody to thrust victories upon them. They aren't going to get good, so they need to get lucky. They don't have an NFL first-round draft pick playing quarterback, like Cal did in 2002 with Kyle Boller. Luck shouldn't be sniffed at; it isn't just fairy dust in a vacuum. It tends to linger. It creates confidence, and confidence is third only to talent and conditioning when it comes to building success in college football. Luck? Football is all about schadenfreude (celebrating other's misfortune). Anybody catch Auburn and Oklahoma imploding in front of their home fans last weekend against Georgia Tech and TCU? Ever seen two powers lose their mojo quicker amid a maelstrom of errors?
Each boneheaded play from a pair of 2004 national title contenders nurtured the Yellow Jackets' and Horned Frogs' swagger, palpably sucking the confidence out of two superior teams. And so we have Cal, arriving with a quarterback, Joseph Ayoob, who completed zero of his 10 passes against I-AA Sacramento State last Saturday before being yanked by Tedford. Hmmm. What happens if the 55,000 or so fans on hand decide to disguise themselves as the 72,000 who used to turn Husky Stadium into a place where eardrums go to die, and Ayoob feels like Phyllis Schlafly at a 50 Cent concert? Or what if talented tailback Marshawn Lynch catches fumblitis for the first time in his career? Or if a young defense with eight new starters makes like a salted slug? Not likely. But some valid "what ifs?" The Huskies' 2002 loss to Cal is arguably where things started to go haywire, when a "curse" took hold and the program went bankrupt, as Hemingway once wrote, "gradually then suddenly." So crack out the rabbits' feet. Someone make a bunch of Tedford voodoo dolls. Without a little luck, this is going to be a long season.
No comments:
Post a Comment