Washington’s mistakes still sting after loss to Stanford knocks Huskies out of rankings

Miscues still stinging Huskies after Stanford loss

SEATTLE — With every tackle Stanford’s Toby Gerhart shed, Daniel Te’o-Nesheim knew the numbers were getting out of hand and the film would not be fun to watch.

“I left the game hating myself and down in the dumps,” Washington’s soft-spoken defensive end said Monday. “But one thing you know as years go on, the film is never as bad as you think if you’re playing hard. It just seems like missing tackles really hurt us.”

Te’o-Nesheim was one of many Huskies left trying to explain what went wrong at Stanford on Saturday night when the Cardinal bulled through the Huskies’ defense in a 34-14 victory, ending Washington’s brief return to the Top 25.

After stunning USC in a 16-13 victory and holding the Trojans’ potent offense without a touchdown in the final three quarters, Washington’s defense was plagued against Stanford by a series of missed tackles, missed assignments and an inability to slow down a basic set of running plays the Cardinal kept calling.

The result was 321 yards rushing by the Cardinal, the third-highest total allowed by Washington in the last five seasons, and a more than seven-minute advantage in time of possession.

And things don’t necessarily get any easier this week for Washington, which is facing a cross-country road trip and a date with Notre Dame on Saturday, a team Washington has never beaten in seven previous tries.

“We’ll take it on head on. We’ll address it as far as we need to know where we screwed up. We need to know why it happened and what happened,” Washington coach Steve Sarkisian said. “That’s what today’s about, getting to the truth of the game. That’s the first thing. Then once you get to the truth, you have to fix what needs to be fixed. And then the third thing is, we need to implement what we think is going to be successful to go beat Notre Dame with.”

Washington’s problems with stopping the run were first evident against USC, when the Trojans gashed them for big runs early. But the Huskies made adjustments and were able to slow down USC for the final three quarters. Much of the Trojans’ 250 yards rushing came early and was largely considered a product of USC’s supreme talent.

But using basic off-tackle runs with Gerhart, the Cardinal proved there might be a bigger problem. Gerhart rumbled for a career-high 200 yards and Stanford needed to throw only 14 times in the victory.

After four games, the Huskies rank 106th in the country at stopping the run. They might be a little more short-handed against Notre Dame as well. Starting outside linebacker E.J. Savannah injured his foot against Stanford and had an MRI on Monday.

“They lined up and ran a couple of different plays at us and we couldn’t stop it. That hurts,” Washington linebacker Donald Butler said. “To see that they had really rushed for a ridiculous amount of yards, as a linebacker, you feel bad.”

Washington’s offense didn’t give much help to its defense against Stanford either. Quarterback Jake Locker was pressured constantly and, when he did get time to throw, made a few critical mistakes, including an interception on Washington’s first drive near the Stanford end zone.

The running game also struggled, managing just 100 yards on 27 carries. Despite Locker’s ability as a runner, Sarkisian stressed that he doesn’t want his quarterback running any more than he has and that the blocking up front needs to get better and open more holes for the backs.

So far this season, Locker has carried the ball 33 times for 74 yards. Washington’s leading rusher is Chris Polk with 316 yards, but he has an average of just 3.8 yards per carry.

“I think we would be hitting the panic button today to say Jake needed to have 10 or 12 quarterback runs this week because we can’t run the ball and then the next thing you know he gets nicked up and where are we?” Sarkisian said. “I think we’ve got a system in place as we talked about that has withstood the test of time. We have a great belief in our run game.”