The Washington Huskies football team rebounded from a 12 to 10 loss at California with a hard fought 27 to 23 win over Stanford Saturday night at Husky Stadium. Husky head coach Chris Petersen spoke with the media on Monday and addressed the return of Myles Gaskin, Hunter Bryant, the Husky crowd and the bye week.
Opening Statement
A lot better to be sitting here with a win than a loss, without question. First and foremost, so appreciative and grateful we got to play that game at home and the environment was really, really cool and there was no question that our fan base truly helps us win. You go back to when is the last time we’ve lost here, and it’s been a while. I really attribute a lot of that to the energy that Husky Nation brings to the table, and it’s awesome. Love that.
“Appreciate how hard our guys played. In some ways, kind of willed it to happen. There was some really good, clean football and some stuff that definitely needs to be cleaned up. Even some head-scratching stuff that you think we make some of these plays we didn’t make. I just like the passion that was in that stadium, how hard they played. You knew that Stanford was going to come back and make some sort of run. We hoped that maybe we could have scored another touchdown or two in the second half to take some pressure off everybody. But didn’t happen and had to grind it out, which we seem to do for most of our games. It’s kind of how we play.”
On the head-scratching plays
“Just certain plays we have every game where I’m like, I think we should be able to make that play. Or not make that error. I watch a lot of football —not just us — in terms of tape and even some high-performing teams have some of that stuff. You’re going to have it. But the margin for error, which is kind of how we’ve been all year, is slim. Those things get frustrating.”
On losing 21-0 point lead at half time much of that is on not making plays, and how much of that is Stanford making adjustments?)
“I seem to think a lot of times the halftime thing is overrated. We don’t see teams come out and make these major adjustments. It’s tweaks, it’s a play here…oh, we haven’t got to this yet. We want to get back to that. There are some tweaks but it’s not like you’re coming out with a new game plan. What they were doing — I will say this: Stanford’s offense, they made plays. Our guys were in position, we had two guys at times or one guy in great shape and the kids made plays. We’ve looked at that and maybe next year we probably do this, but at the end of the day, Costello threw some tight balls in some very tight windows and those big receivers made plays on that side of the ball to kind of bring them back. We didn’t make those type of plays on offense the second half to really get something going.
Thoughts on Hunter Bryant return
“It was good to have him out there. It was different from practice and it was really good to have him back there and building up his stamina, building up his game speed and all those type of things. It was good to have him out there.”
On sophomore DBs playing big roles on Saturday
“I don’t think of them as young. They played all last year and we’re at Game 10. There’s a lot of meaningful reps that those guys have got. They really have throughout the course of the of the past two years. They didn’t bat an eye and we wouldn’t expect them to bat an eye. They really played like I thought they would.
The win over Stanford propelled the Huskies back into the National Polls. The Huskies checked in at number #20 in the AP Poll and # 18th in the Coaches Poll.
