University of Washington Huskies (4-2 Pac-12, 6-3 overall) head coach Chris Petersen met with the media Monday for his weekly press conference and reviewed the teams loss to the California Golden Bears ( 2-3, 5-3) on Saturday and looked ahead to Saturday’s game against the Standford Cardinal ( 3-2, 5-3) at Husky Stadium ( 6p.m., Pac- Networks).
Opening statement
On his decision to pull Jake Brown for Jake Haener.
( On why the offense is plodding?)
“I don’t know. We go down on a 17-play drive, and those are painful. That’s pretty impressive, 17 plays, and then you score. You’d like to get some explosives in there where guys break tackles and make some things happen and that’s really hard to do. But that seems to be a little bit of who we are right now. We’re working hard to change that. For whatever reason, we have little margin for error.”
(What did you think Haener was going to bring in that moment?)
“He plays well. He does some very good things in practice every week. Jake Browning is our quarterback, but Jake Haener does some different things. He does. I was just trying to create that spark for our offense. It’s good for other guys to get reps in real-life situations and I know people are saying that’s a tough situation to put a guy…he was itching for it. There was no hesitation. He made a bad, kind of a missed throw where he could have come off a little bit, the receiver didn’t help him on where he was route-wise, talking about that interception. But we’ll all learn from it.”
(How easy of a call was it to kick the field goal on fourth-and-10?)
“Yeah, pretty easy. Yeah. It really was. You’re playing those things by how it’s kind of going in the game and what your offense is doing. Time left in the game and all those kind of things.”
Does Browning look like a better QB than he was a year ago?)
“I don’t know about better. I think he does some things better. I thinks sometimes the numbers can be a little bit deceiving when you got a new coordinator and you put some spins on those type of things. Jake makes a lot of plays. And he makes a lot of good plays. He made a lot of plays and some big-time throws in that game. We just need to figure out how to help him and this offense score more points.”
(On the team moving on and getting ready for Stanford)
(On Stanford’s Bryce Love
“I think last week he was looking like the Bryce Love I knew last year. I hadn’t really seen Stanford up until this week. I haven’t looked at much of anything. But I know he’s one of those guys who has breakaway speed but he’s deceptively strong. He just breaks tackles. I saw that again in that Stanford game. He can change the game.”
(On Stanford’s defense) “Their defense I think they have some realy good players. There are some guys that really flash. It’s different than it was last year. They have some younger guys in there that flash quite a bit and I think those guys are on an upward trend for sure. I know those Stanford teams, how they play. They’re tough, their hard-nosed, they get better, they compete their tail off and I know how this game will be. It will be a tough fight for sure.”
( On Myles Gaskin and Hunter Bryant injury update?)
“Close. They’re close.”
