3 things: What the Ducks need to do to beat the Huskies
LAS VEGAS (KOIN) -- Friday's game against the University of Washington Huskies in Las Vegas will almost assuredly decide the University of Oregon Ducks' fate this season.
Win and they’re almost assuredly in the college football playoff unless absolute madness happens.
Lose and they’re definitely out.
A month and a half ago these two teams squared off in Seattle with UW winning 36-33.
Let’s take you through three things that happened in that game that the Ducks need file away to win Friday.
TAKE ‘EM WHILE YOU’VE GOT ‘EM
This is the most obvious one so we’re just going to get it out of the way first: Take. The. Points.
Oregon went for it on fourth down twice within Washington’s ten-yard line and came away with goose eggs both times. One of those field goals sends the game to overtime. Two and we’re having a very different conversation right now.
It’s pretty wild to look at the box score for this game. If you just gave me the numbers blind and didn’t tell me Oregon went 0-for-3 on fourth down, I would’ve told you they won. They had 126 more yards of offense, had the ball for about nine and a half more minutes, and completed 63% of their third downs compared to UW’s 45%.
I know the old adage here is don’t trade field goals for touchdowns but coming away with zero points twice within the 10-yard line just cannot happen and is a huge reason why they lost.
EXPLOSIVE MISTAKES
Okay, it’s the most "no duh" thing of all time to say limit explosive plays, but I wanted to dive in a little more to Michael Penix’s numbers to illustrate what went wrong here.
By definition, an explosive play in the passing game is a throw for 15 or more yards. Penix had 22 completions in this game. Eight counted as explosives. That doesn’t seem crazy until you dive more into it.
Those eight passes accounted for 200 yards. Penix’s passing yards total from that affair in Seattle? 302. So over 2/3rds of his passing yards came from eight plays.
Let’s go deeper.
Penix had four passing touchdowns against the Ducks. All four were explosive plays. Two of those explosive play touchdowns came immediately after Penix had an explosive throw the play before. Just those four plays accounted to 122 passing yards. Over a third of his yards came from four plays. Oh yeah, and one of those two touchdowns was the game-winner.
The moral of the story is this: Penix has shown he’s mortal this season. The Ducks defense has to make that a reality a little more this time around to have a chance, and they absolutely cannot give up multiple back-to-back explosives like they did in Seattle.
PUT THE FOOT ON THE GAS
This Husky team has shown time and again this season that they play to the level of their competition, and it even happened against Oregon a bit.
With 10 and a half minutes to go in the third quarter, UW went up 29-18. Oregon didn’t score again until ninety seconds left in that quarter. This UW team had the chance to put the Ducks away during that time frame. Instead, they didn’t score a single point again until the final ninety seconds of the game.
This has been a trend for the Huskies this year.
Six of their games have been decided by eight points or less. Oregon hammered Washington State, Oregon State, and Arizona State this season. The Huskies beat those teams by 3, 2, and 8 points respectively.
If Oregon can lay the hammer down tonight, I don’t think UW can keep up and like I said, they even showed that a bit with an 11-point lead the last time these two teams faced off. If only Oregon could've fully capitalized during those 25 scoreless minutes of playtime for the Huskies.
Oregon and UW face off at 5 p.m. on Friday in Las Vegas. We’ll be live from Allegiant Stadium after the game on KOIN 6 News at 10 and 11 to bring you the latest.