UW hopes to mirror performance
Mirror, mirror under the field...?
By: Richard Linde, Posted 6 November 2003

Underneath the football field, a lab is making mirrors for giant telescopes, while atop the field this Saturday, the Washington Huskies (5-4, 3-2) hope to mirror last week’s performance against Oregon when they take on the Arizona Wildcats (1-8, 0-5) at Arizona Stadium. Washington is a 16-point favorite to beat Arizona in this homecoming game.

Yawn, I'm more excited about the mirrors than the game. On with the game, then the mirrors, leaving the desert's dessert for last.

According to Collegio Football, Arizona has an average ranking (offensively and defensively) of ninety-ninth in the nation, this out of 117 Division 1-A schools.  The Huskies’ average rank is 48. Since 1978, Washington’s all-time record against Arizona is 14-4-1. The series’ average score is Washington 31, Arizona 20.

Surprisingly, if not truly amazing, Collegio says the UW has a 100% chance of winning. Horrors, what if the 'Cats transmogrify into werewolves and do a Wolf Pack on the Dawgs? Collegio's prediction, rivaling a bite of the undead, could once more result in a Duel in the Sun against Purdue at El Paso.

To wit, the Huskies lost to an underdog Nevada Wolf Pack team at Husky Stadium earlier in the year, a loss, in retrospect, that will cost the UW a shot at the Rose Bowl if it should win its next 3 games and finish as runner up in the conference to USC, which could go to the Sugar Bowl. It takes 9 wins to go a BCS bowl, along with a BCS ranking of 12 or less, and the best the Dawgs can accomplish is 8-4, which is no BCS, without the C.

If the Huskies win the conference championship, then they automatically go to the Rose Bowl, but that scenario requires that UCLA and USC each lose twice.

The Huskies have won 4 straight against the ‘Cats and have won 7 out of their last 8 meetings.

According to the table below, Washington trumps Arizona in all 20 categories of measure, which is a first on this website for any team. The UW has an average Pac-10 ranking of 5.05, compared to Arizona's ranking of 8.7, where least is best. Arizona has made only 22% of its field goals and is averaging barely more than 16 points per game.

Currently, Arizona has 69 football players on scholarship.

The Wildcats (1-8) are 0-4 under Mike Hankwitz, who was promoted from defensive coordinator on September 28 after the school fired embattled coach John Mackovic.

The Wildcats will be without start running back Clarence Farmer, who was dismissed from the team. "As a matter of fact, I've suspended Clarence Farmer for the rest of the year. He will not return. That's all I will say about the matter,” said Hankwitz. Hankwitz has told the Tucson Citizen that Farmer had been late for practice and "sealed his own fate."

In recent weeks, the Huskies have lost TB Rich Alexis, OG Tusi Sa’au and CB Chris Massey all to injury and the three of them are not expected to play.

Washington QB Cody Pickett, who suffered a concussion against Oregon last week, is expected to start. The C-Town Cowboy may be the toughest quarterback ever to play in the Pac-10. Pickett hails from Caldwell, Idaho and is the son of Dee Pickett, a former world-champion performer on the rodeo circuit.

The series, in recent years, is mindful of some spectacular plays: (1) Ortese Jenkins "Summersault at the Lake," in a game (1998) that UA won 31-28, and (2) "Willie's Whirl," provided by Willie Hurst in a game (2000) that the UW won 35-32.

Last week, we referred to the conference as "Carroll and the Seven Dwarves," both Stanford and UA being mini-dwarves. Now that Stanford has beaten UCLA, the Tree has earned full dwarf status, meaning it is capable of beating any full-grown dwarf on a given Saturday. UCLA dominated the stats before and after the game with Stanford but lost because of football's intangible element: emotion. Full of pent up emotion, Arizona, like the Tree, would love to turn the table below upside down.

Mirror, mirror under the field, what will this game yield?

Nothing, really, in the grand scheme of it all.

If the game turns out as the statistics say it should, before the game’s end, Sonny Sixkiller should be talking about the laboratory under the football field, as it has a far more profound effect on our lives than any drubbing of Arizona.

At the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory, a team of scientists and engineers are making giant, lightweight mirrors of unprecedented power for a new generation of optical and infrared telescopes. The laboratory is located beneath the east end of Arizona’s football field. Two mirrors have been constructed for the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), the world’s largest optical and infrared telescope. In 2004, the work for the telescope will be completed on Mt. Graham in Arizona. Mt. Graham stands 10,298 feet above sea level.

Work for covering the LBTs primary mirrors with a reflective coating of aluminum was done at an Ohio State University research lab.

With its giant mirrors, the $100 million LBT is to have 25 times the light-collecting area and 10 times the image resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope.

The LBT works by creating two "sub-telescopes," both looking at the same bright star, but positioned so starlight from each sub-telescope travels in slightly different paths before hitting the detector. When properly aligned, crests of light waves from one sub-telescope will line up with the troughs of the light waves from the other, in effect canceling the light of a bright star.

Hence, planets orbiting the star will be visible.

Why make the LBT? Because the universe makes intelligent beings out of stardust for comprehending its stardust.

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No Live Telecast: Time 3:00 PM, PST (Psst, if you're not going to the game, listen to Bob Rondeau's live internet broadcast via KJR and watch a rebroadcast on Fox Northwest (e.g., DirecTV), the following day.

Our prediction, Huskies, 42-21

 Table 1. How they stand in the Pac-10