A week on the recruiting trait invigorated the Washington Huskies’ coaching staff. Jimmy Lake and his coaching staff hit the recruiting trail and after spending countless hours in the film room evaluating the first quarter of the season. With a 2-3 overall record and just 1-1 in conference play Lake was jovial, upbeat, and confident of his team’s performance in the remaining seven games
EVALUATION PROCESS
“Well, good morning. I missed you guys. Feels like it’s been a minute. First of all, the bye week was beneficial to our players. We got a lot of guys rested up and healed up. It was beneficial for us recruiting-wise. It was our first time we’ve been in high schools since February of 2020, and you could just feel the jolt of energy and enthusiasm by the high school coaches and also the prospects and the players, just seeing the Washington logo across the campuses, across all the footprint in the west coast and out into Texas.”
It was great to be able to evaluate these players in person, which all of us in college football have not been able to do for a long time and be able for us to see a bunch of high school football games as well. So that was really cool for all the prospects and underclassmen and seniors-to-be, for them to see colleges on their campus.
PLAYER AND COACH UPDATES
Lake gave a status update on offensive line coach Durham Cato who was injured on the sidelines during the Huskies’ loss to Oregon State and Co-Defensive coordinator Bob Gregory also took ill after the Beaver game.
“A couple status updates here, injury-wise: first, for our coaching staff, coach Cato is getting better and he will be available for our games. Also coach Gregory, who had a non-COVID injury after our Oregon State game, he’s good to go. He’s on the mend. He’ll be healthy, and I’m glad he’s in good shape.”
The biggest newest for Lake was announcing that Zion Tupuola-Fetu was back practicing with the team.
“Then a big one here, I’m so proud of this guy: Zion participated in his first full padded practice. It’s just really astounding, how he has been able to overcome such a devastating injury. I think I told you guys this way back when: you could just see it in his eyes the day it happened, that he was going to be determined to come back quicker than the experts thought.
It looks like that’s the case. He is still week-to-week. But to see him in full dress and going full go was impressive. I’m so proud of his work ethic, and obviously our training staff and medical staff in getting him back this quick from such a devastating injury.”
Lake also announced that placekicker Tim Horn would be entering the transfer portal.
MOVING FORWARD
While five games is a modest body of work to evaluate Lake believes the coaching staff saw enough for the team to move forward on a positive note.
We learned a ton. It was breaking down all five of those games, all three phases, the good things that we’re doing, but also maybe the good things that we’re doing that we know our opponents will catch up to, so now we have to make some tweaks and fix those things. But, then also the things that we’re not doing so well and how we can correct those, and so now we’ve got to make sure we’re correcting that. I think from a whole team standpoint, the biggest thing that we have to fix is our turnover ratio, which is not very good right now, and we know turnover ratio is a huge indicator on wins and losses.
We need to protect the football better, and we need to get more turnovers. We’re working back to a better ratio right now. We started off with one of the worst in the country after the first two games, turning the ball over and not getting any turnovers. We’re making headway of getting back on the plus side, but that’s going to be a big — and has always been a big — push around here is to get more turnovers and to make sure we limit turnovers so we can win that turnover battle each game, and we know that is going to help us win more football games.”
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