The Washington Huskies came back down to Earth as they faced off against the Michigan Wolverines. The team kept things close with a 7-7 tie at intermission before it all unraveled following halftime. The defense did all that they could but the offense did not hold up their end of the bargain. Michigan forced 3 turnovers in the 2nd half and used it to propel them to a 24-7 victory over Washington. Demond Williams Jr. had a game to forget as he threw an INT in 3 of the team’s last 4 offensive drives (the 4th ending on downs). The Dawgs head back to the drawing board as they come back to Seattle in hopes of starting a new home winning streak.
Offense: The Wheels Came Off on the Road
This was not a good outing for the offense. It’s reasonable to assume a drop off in production with 2/5 of the OL being injured, not to mention the back up LT as well, but that’s not enough to explain the mental errors, disjointed offensive drives, miscommunication, and uncharacteristic mistakes that plagued the Husky offense in Ann Arbor this past weekend. There’s more to it than that, and while I know that anything I say is purely speculative, let’s take a look at a few plays to see what might be up with the offense.
1st Quarter – 10:32 – 2nd & 12
First up, we have a near interception early in the first quarter. During the game, the TV commentary talked about it looking like a miscommunication between Demond Williams and Denzel Boston, and I think they nailed a tendency that’s been consistent in slow road starts that we’ve seen before. We’ve got a mirrored Double Slant concept called (Double Slants on both sides) with Michigan showing and playing a soft Cover 4. It’s impossible to know for sure if Boston had an option route baked into the play, but it did look like Demond was throwing a pass expecting a Hitch route. A Hitch route would make some sense given the off coverage from the CB (#20). The boundary side slot defender (#7) was going to be drawing in by the Slant route out of the slot either way to open up the passing lane to Boston, and a Hitch route that kept Boston further to the outside would’ve maximized that passing lane. Even if #7 stayed static instead of his slight in-step with the slot Slant, a Hitch would’ve been open.
As I mentioned, it wouldn’t be the first time that Demond and Boston appeared to be on different pages for a potential option route. Demond’s interception in the first half of the Maryland game also looked like they read the defense differently with Boston breaking off his route when Demond was expecting him to keep running. Assuming that this play against Michigan did have an option route for Boston, I would put this miscue on Boston. There wasn’t a disguised coverage, and against this Coverage look, it was pretty clear that it should’ve been a Hitch route.
3rd Quarter – 1:32 – 1st & 10
While we were able to avoid the interception on the last play, we weren’t so lucky later in the game. This time though, I do think that this was on Demond. On this play, we’re running a Slant-Flat concept into the boundary, again to Boston and again against a Cover 4 look from the defense. Michigan doesn’t have anything tricky being called to disguise their coverage, and their CBs are playing off coverage with a 2-high shell, so the offense definitely should’ve had an idea on how to attack the defense, even if they were worried that it was still a disguised coverage.
In a Cover 4 look, whether it’s standard zone or pattern match, there are four defenders deep and three defenders underneath in coverage. The three underneath defenders are split up between the two flats and a middle defender. That’s a lot of ground to cover for the two underneath defenders covering the flats, so they will have to book it to the perimeter. For whatever reason, Demond didn’t anticipate it when he made the throw.
You can see it better from the replay angle, the LB responsible for the flat zone was reading Adam Mohammed (#24) to find see if he was going to threaten his zone. As soon as he see’s Mohammed’s intention, he sprints to the flat. With Boston running a Slant, Demond either needs to rip the pass to the Slant right at the break in the route, or wait until the LB covering the slot moves past the passing lane for the Slant. Unfortunately, he simply doesn’t see the flat defender and gift wraps the interception to him.
Schematically, there isn’t a whole lot for me to break down on this play, but this is a good opportunity for us to briefly discuss play calling and QB psychology. At this late stage of the game, some play callers and QBs start to press too hard and make mistakes. That’s why commentators always talk about poise late in games. If you start to press, you rush your reads, make mistakes, and you can start to spiral. Unfortunately that is what I think happened to Demond starting at the end of the 3rd quarter. He started to get unsettled and made uncharacteristic misreads on a routine play like this.
3rd Quarter – 0:36 – 1st & 10
Speaking of pressing, after the interception above, which was just two plays prior to this play, Demond made yet another misread/rushed throw on another routine play that ended up with an interception. On this play, we’re running a Stick concept. The Stick concept is a three-man concept usually run out of a Trips look. The outside WR runs a Go route to clear out the CB, the WR2 (#7) runs a Speed Out, and then the WR3 (#86) usually has a Hitch/Speed Out option route. The QB is usually coached to read the WR2 and WR3 spacing against the slot defender over WR2. If the defender covers WR2, then the QB has to hit WR3 right at the break. If the slot defender stays home against WR3, then the ball goes to the WR2 Speed Out in space.
You can see it both on the broadcast angle and the replay angle here, but the slot defender (#7) stays home against DeGraaf’s route creating an inside outside bracket. Demond doesn’t see this and locks in on DeGraaf to force the pass. Additionally, Demond doesn’t read that the LB (#30) is sitting at the top of DeGraaf’s route, which is an indicator for DeGraaf to break outside on the Speed Out instead of sitting in the gap between underneath zones. Demond misreads that and is anticipating DeGraaf to sit down on a Hitch. This leaves the pass behind DeGraaf and goes right into the hands of #30.
I don’t want to be too harsh on Demond, but this play is so uncharacteristic that I do think that he was starting to get rattled late in the game facing a deficit. He lacked his usual poise after the previous interception, and he started to spiral.
4th Quarter – 8:42 – 4th & 3
Finally, we have a strip sack play that basically ended our hopes of a comeback. While we recovered the ball, it was a 4th down attempt that turned over the ball deep in our own territory while down two scores. There are two things that I took away from this play after rewatching it for Film Study. One, Demond is a magician, but there are limits to his magic that Fisch may put to much faith into when making aggressive decisions. Two, again, Fisch may think too highly of Demond and does him few favors when designing/calling plays.
Facing 4th & short, Fisch dials up a passing play out of a nub formation. Passing plays out of nub formations (3×1 with the TE on the line as the solo receiver) are a known Fisch tendency. Not only that, he tends to call 3-man concepts with the TE and RB staying in to block on the back side of the OL sliding away from the TE. Knowing that, Michigan calls a Zone blitz that matches their best EDGE (#8) 1v1 against the TE, Decker DeGraaf. We had already lost Quentin Moore and Kade Eldridge, our blocking TEs, to injury earlier in the game, so we were left with DeGraaf, our receiving option at TE.
Demond was already getting rattled after back to back interceptions on the last couple of possessions, and his typical awareness was a bit off. He already tended to hold onto the ball too long, but in this type of high leverage situation, I’m surprised that Fisch didn’t make further accommodations in pass protection to buy Demond more time to make a play and to hide DeGraaf’s blocking mismatch. It’s not fair to blame the result of the play on DeGraaf given the situation he was put in, plus the fact that the rest of the iOL got beat too. Instead, I have a lot of questions on whether Fisch is the kind of in-game play caller that can succeed when playing with a talent disadvantage.
Defense: Who’s Got the TE?
Interestingly enough, the often criticized defense actually had the strongest performance among UW’s three units against the Wolverines. Despite still yielding enough points to result in a 3-possession final margin, one could argue that 10 of those 17 points weren’t on the defense. When the game is tied 7-7 with less than 17 minutes left and the offense finishes the game with four possessions resulting in interception (inside the UW 20), interception, turnover on downs (due to a strip sack inside the UW 20), and interception, it’s almost impressive that we only allowed 17 points.
With that being said, the defense did get lucky on a few occasions with drops and a missed Michigan field goal. If not for their own miscues, Michigan might’ve scored more. They were able to consistently string together long drives through a consistent and effective run game (a known issue for our defense at this point) and chunk yardage throwing to their TEs. To date, TEs haven’t been a specific weakness for our defense, but the ways that Michigan utilized their TEs exploited known defensive weak spots. Let me show you what I mean.
1st Quarter – 6:29 – 2nd & 16
First up, we have a near miss in our favor against their TE up the seam. We’re running Tampa 2 on this play with Jacob Manu (#9) at MIKE. In Tampa 2, the MIKE has the toughest assignment covering both the underneath middle of the field as well as dropping deep enough to act like a mid-field safety. Tampa 2 is designed specifically to defend against Seam routes targeting the soft spot between the two deep safeties. The problem here on this play is that we have Manu and Zadrius Rainey-Sale (#23) at LB in this personnel grouping, and neither of them seem to have the speed and range to cover deep as would be required to effectively run Tampa 2. On this particular play, Michigan has their TEs running Seam routes on both sides of the formation, and it’s a pick your poison decision for Manu in coverage. With no underneath routes, ZRS could’ve dropped further in coverage to disrupt the passing windows, but I’d say he played assignment effectively enough that this isn’t on him. I’d also argue that Michigan’s QB threw to the wrong TE since the other TE (#83) was running behind Manu with space, but either way, both TEs should’ve been able to get a deep completion against the mismatch versus Manu.
1st Quarter – 6:22 – 3rd & 16
More frustratingly, on this play, immediately after the previous Film Study play, Michigan goes right back to their TE for a big gain on 3rd & long to set up a short 4th down conversion. On this play, we’re running spot drop zone Cover 3 and are intentionally playing deep knowing that we have yards to yield prior to the first down. The problem I have with this coverage call though is how conservatively we’re playing. We’ve got seven defenders playing at least 12 yards off the ball at the top of their initial zone drops against three vertical routes. I get wanting to cover deep first given the down and distance, but I don’t like leaving the entire middle of the field open without a defender even remotely close to one of their eligible receivers. We aren’t sound enough tackling in the open field to make coverage calls like this, and we’re lucky that we didn’t give up a clear first down.
3rd Quarter – 11:08 – 3rd & 6
Finally, we’ve got another long gain to a TE in a 3rd down situation. This time, we’re showing a simulated pressure look with our LBs mugged up at the LOS. However, at the snap we bail rushing just four while playing Cover 1 man coverage across the board with a lurker underneath. Against this, Michigan is running a “Super Mesh” concept to set up a catch and run situation. Super Mesh is just like normal Mesh, except they basically have everyone running crossing routes to create more traffic in the hopes of getting a natural rub that would get somebody free. In this case, they are running three crossers from the left and #83 as the lone crosser from the right.
Our underneath defenders actually do a good job avoiding a clean rub from the crossers on the left. However, unfortunately neither Deven Bryant (#17) nor Alex McLaughlin (#12) diagnosed the TE #83 sneaking across the field against traffic in time to actually keep up with him in stride. This isn’t the first time that opposing offenses have specifically targeted Bryant and McLaughlin in man coverage, but it’s disappointing that neither could really keep up against a TE that shouldn’t be an athletic mismatch.
Awgs’ Bonus Play of the Week
Shoutout to Jonah Coleman for bringing a bright spot and showcasing his versatility with this catch and run.
