Washington puts emphasis on last year’s Stanford rout

SEATTLE – While the rest of the world returns to the scene of the crime tonight when ESPN telecasts the University of Washington-Stanford game from the Seattle Seahawks’ NFL stadium, all the Huskies are looking for is a defensive team.

In four consecutive wins over UW, Stanford has scored 175 points – an average of almost 44 per game. The low point, from a defensive standpoint, came when the Cardinal piled up 446 rushing yards and scored 65 points in a blowout win last October.

It’s a game that remains fresh in the memories of Huskies who were at Stanford Stadium that evening.

“That was terrible,” sophomore linebacker John Timu said. “That was a terrible feeling that we don’t want to experience again.”

The memory of last year’s game is fueling UW (2-1) as it heads into tonight’s opener of Pacific-12 Conference play against the eighth-ranked Cardinal (3-0).

“You never want to get embarrassed like that,” wide receiver Kasen Williams said. “You want to get back, some way, somehow. We’ve waited a whole year to do it.”

In last year’s game, the Huskies hung with Stanford for a little more than a quarter. A pair of long Chris Polk touchdown runs, from 46 and 61 yards, put UW within 17-14 90 seconds into the second quarter. The Cardinal scored 31 unanswered points to turn it into the rout after three quarters, and UW never could stop Stanford’s ground game on the way to a 65-21 loss.

For the most part, the Huskies are trying to put last year behind them. That was one of the low points of the 2011 season, and this year’s team would prefer to forget about it.

“I just felt like we weren’t really in it,” Williams said. “We had nothing really going for us that game. And I think this year’s going to be different.”