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Purple beats White, 33-0, as Jake impresses
About 200 former Husky players attended the game, including former Husky quarterbacks and Rose Bowl heroes Marques Tuiasosopo and Warren Moon. Quarterbacking the Purples, Jake Locker completed 88.9% of his passes, connecting on 16 out of 18 passes for 200 yards and two touchdowns with no picks. His passing efficiency rating was a most impressive 218.89 on the game. He ran in from 10 yards out for another touchdown. For most of the game, Locker engineered a smooth running, unstoppable freight train. Although the weather was chilly, Jake's performance was a hot tamale, to coin the old play on Spanish food. And a hot tamale (future) it could be for Jake, with my apologies to the Los Vaqueros restaurant in Hemet, my favorite location for Spanish food. It was Locker's best passing performance of his career at UW, in either a scrimmage or a regular season's game. Quarterbacks coach Doug Nussmeier, along with head coach Steve Sarkisian, a former quarterback at BYU, has been fine tuning Locker's mechanics over the spring practices. Locker has completed 61.1% of his passes over his last 8 games, which includes four scrimmages. See Table 1 below. A solid running game, which accounted for 165 yards on 26 rushes, helped with Locker's passing rhythm, as he threw mostly short to intermediate passes. Jermaine Kearse caught five passes for 70 yards and one touchdown, and Chris Polk, looking like the playmaker he is touted to be, ran 12 times for 95 yards and scored a touchdown. The Purple defense held the White's ground game to just 11 net yards on 16 carries. Playing for the White team, Ronnie Fouch completed 7 of 16 passes for 52 yards, with an efficiency rating of 71.05. He was sacked twice for 8 yards by Mason Foster, who registered 4 tackles and, of whom, after the game, was cited by linebackers coach Mike Cox for his outstanding performance this spring. Cox thinks his starting linebackers are as good as any other linebacker unit in the Pac-10. He lamented his thinness at this position, however, and hopes to add some depth to it from the incoming class in the fall. Although the first-team purples scored a touchdown on all 4 of its possessions in the first half, the White defense came alive in the third quarter and was able to stop the Purple team at its own 10-yard line after it took possession of the ball on the 1. On the next Purple possession, the White team held the Purple to just one first down. Locker hit Kearse with an 8-yard touchdown pass on the last play of the game, culminating a 64-yard, 8-play drive. Although the first-team offense played against the second-team defense, it was paramount for the Dawgs to show they could put points on the board this spring. Last season, the Huskies averaged just 13.2 points per game. The Dawgs have averaged 33 points per scrimmage over the course of their 3 outings this spring. Jake apparently has completely recovered from the broken thumb he suffered in the fourth game of last season, and he demonstrated on Saturday that he can meet Sark's bogey of being a 60% passer -- the one caveat being that he gets the right kind of support from his offense, as he did captaining the Purple to its win. Two missed try for points added a sour note to the kicking game. There were no kickoffs or punts and, wearing yellow jerseys, the quarterbacks were off-limits to tackling. I watched the video feed on gohuskies.com and charted the game (see Table 3 for the play-by-play and lineups). The lineups were taken from Bob Condotta's blog. Nick Daschel of Buster Sports has this to say about the scrimmage. The photo of the Huskies' canine mascot, Dubs, was purchased from Replay Photos and then scanned and edited with Adobe Photo Shop. See the following link for all the statistics. (LINK). ------------ Table 1. Jake Locker's passing efficiency rating over his last 8 games, which includes four scrimmages. He has completed 61.1% of his passes. When Locker's offensive line and receivers are the equal or the better of the pass defense he is facing, he is as good a passer as any other quarterback in the Pac-10, if not better. The Oklahoma stats buttress this notion. The Sooners ranked 99th in the country in pass defense last season.
Table 2. Statistics from last four scrimmages. The data from the 4/18/09 and 4/25/09 scrimmages were provided by the UW Sports information department. The data from the 4/11 scrimmage was taken from Bob Condotta's blog, with some unsettling qualifications from Bob notwithstanding. (w) means he played for White.
Table 3. Play-by-play LINEUPS ---Purple; the Ones: Jake Locker, Chris Polk, Willie Griffin, Demetrius Bronson, Paul Homer, Chris Izbicki, Kavario Middleton, Devin Aguilar, Jordan Polk, Jermaine Kearse, Cody Bruns, Cody Habben, Ben Ossai, Ryan Tolar, Senio Kelemete, Drew Schaefer, Mykenna Ikehara, De’Shon Matthews, Alameda Ta'amu, Daniel Te'o-Nesheim, Darrion Jones, Cameron Elisara, Donald Butler, Mason Foster, Trenton Tuiasosopo, Brandon Huppert, Johri Fogerson, Greg Walker, Nate Williams, Justin Glenn, Quinton Richardson, Matt Mosley. White; the Twos: Ronnie Fouch, Taylor Bean, Curtis Shaw, Freeman, Austin Sylvester, Togi, Hayes, Savant, Cody Bruns, Leonard, Anthony Boyles, tony Chidiac, Ikehara, Armelin, Christine, Shugert, Morgan Rosborough, Kanczugowksi, Scott, Galbraith, Remington, Wood, Tyrone Duncan, Criag Noble, Wiggs, Roussel, Mangum, Poe, Houston, Amosa, Aiyewa, Logan, Johnson, Lappano, Goberm, Long, Persley.
Richard Linde can be reached at malamute@4malamute.com |
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Made up of both the first team offense and defense,
the Huskies' Purple team defeated the White team, 33-0, in front of an
estimated 10,000 fans at Husky Stadium in Washington's annual spring
game.