Huskies must cool down hype surrounding Luck
SEATTLE – The way the University of Washington football coaches and players have been talking this week, a person might expect a 30-foot tall, Cardinal-red Transformer to walk out onto the field at Stanford Stadium shooting footballs out of his eye sockets.
That’s how great the legend of quarterback Andrew Luck has become over the past 12 months.
And on Saturday night, when the Huskies face Luck’s seventh-ranked Stanford team, the big question is what UW could possibly do to slow him down.
“He’s always been a great player, but now he’s completely in command of their offense,” Huskies safety Justin Glenn said this week. “He’s confident, he’s calling their plays. We’ve just got to be on our toes.”
Said UW defensive coordinator Nick Holt: “He’s got a good arm. He runs really well. He’s got good escapability. He’s an excellent, excellent quarterback. He has all of the attributes you’re looking for.”
The more the Huskies talk about Luck, the less he sounds mortal. And yet UW knows he’s human, having already faced the all-everything quarterback twice before. The Huskies are as experienced as anyone in facing Luck, so they’ll try to use that to their advantage Saturday.
“We look at everyone the same, no matter who it is, even if he’s a great player,” cornerback Desmond Trufant said. “We’re going to compete just as hard as he’s going to compete. So it’s going to be a great battle.”
The Huskies’ best strategy, if there is such a thing against Luck, may well be deception. The junior quarterback’s ability to change things up at the line, a la Peyton Manning, is a big part of his effectiveness, and so the UW defense may have to get into and out of looks quickly to keep Luck on his toes.
“He does everything right,” UW middle linebacker Cort Dennison said. “He sees blitzes and checks out of things, and every check that he does he makes the right call.”
Dennison may have his most active pre-snap game, since the senior is in charge of getting teammates in position. He’ll play the role of the Kasparov to every pawn Luck moves.
“They do a lot of shifts and motions, that kind of thing, so I have the job of helping our defense out,” Dennison said. “But I take pride in that. I like getting guys lined up right. I’m really going to have make sure they’re set this week.
“…They can adjust to us. We can adjust to them. It can be a cat-and-mouse kind of thing.”
Holt, the Huskies’ well-paid defensive coordinator, said UW has to be careful about getting too caught up in the pre-snap chess match.
“The problem is, if we do too much, we’ll nail ourselves in the ground and we won’t play as well as we need to,” he said.
Notes
Stanford will be without starting safety Delano Howell because of a hand injury. “Howell is an excellent player,” Sarkisian said. “He’s really the quarterback of their defense.” … The Cardinal have outscored opponents 50-0 in the first quarter this season and 128-6 in the first and third quarters. “It tells me that they have a real plan when they go into a game and when they come out of halftime,” Sarkisian said.