I think Arizona can win, but Oregon is the better team this year. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Oregon State beat the Ducks in a couple weeks and go Rose Bowling.

Back East they only see and hear USC and Ucla. Agreed Ucla is a basketball school first and foremost. But Easterners don’t know that.

Word is other teams are picking up on him and Sark will probably have to work pretty hard to keep him committed.

because he sure has the results. They talk about someone’s potential to be great. Fuimaono plays great now, his potential is his future growth.

Sark and the coaching staff will bring in top players from the west coast. Snostrebla is right, if we can get them to trip up here it would seal the deal. Kids know who Sark and Holt are in SoCal, they know their prep coaches and are on very good terms with them.

Currently we are riding high on a 3-7 record. What does that say to recruits? Not much. They saw the “I Bark for Sark Show” vs. LSU and they saw us take it to USC. I think every recruit on the west coast got a glimpse as to what to expect from Sark, Holt, and Washington in the upcoming seasons. Sark and Holt are not going to be satisfied until they get back to the Rose Bowl. I expect to see every new recruiting class will get bigger and better from this point forward.

So we are looking at possibly losing Jake Locker to the NFL draft. Are you afraid? I’m not. Jake is a tremendously gifted athlete, best in the Pac 10, and arguably the best ever to suit up in Husky purple. Don’t fool yourselves and quit panicing Lear! Remember when we lost out on the Heaps sweepstakes to BYU? Within a week we got a commitment from Nick Montana and boy oh boy did that change the perspective of the recruiting! We’re going to be okay fellas. Another Jake will come around. Don’t think for a second that if we do lose Jake to the pros this season that it won’t benefit the program. One reason we haven’t gotten great talent up here in the past might have a correlation with the depleted numbers of Washington players being drafted. If Locker goes in the early first round of the NFL draft- what does that say about coach Sark? Under the old coach, Locker wasn’t even close to being ready to be a pro style NFL QB. Within one full season under Sark, Locker and Clausen are the frontrunners to be drafted. Last season it was all about Tebow, Bradford, and McCoy. This season those three guys are sitting behing Locker and Clausen. That is a huge statement about the job coach Sark did on Jake in the offseason. Kids aren’t dumb- they see a great thing in front of them. More on Holt to come…

I Bark for Sark! WOOF!!!

Some have attacked Nick Holt’s tirades on the sideline. They have criticized his emotional outburst and frowns. What those folks don’t see is a coach that demands high defensive expectations from his players. Defense is about “nastiness”. Your job as a defender is to blow up everything in front of you, to destroy the opposing ballcarrier with the ball. To play bigtime college football on defense, you really have to have a mean streak about you. You’ve got to love the defensive side of the ball, you have to play with a reckless abandon, and you have to play with an emotional swagger.

Now teachers use different tactics to get in touch with their students. The focus of the teacher is to come prepared, know the material being covered, and know what makes your students tick. If what Nick Holt is doing on the sideline gets his kids motivated then surely it is a great tool. I for one welcome a defensive coordinator to be an emotional train wreck on the sideline. It sets the defensive tone, it sends a message that our style of defense is going to be an all-out-attack on the opposition.

Now right now, defensively we are limited in what we can do. Holt wants to use defensive tactics that he learned at USC. But we just don’t have the defensive athletes to run those schemes. Oh sure we can run them, but without the athletism it requires we could set up the oppostion for a big play.

Consider this. We all want to see an attack style defense, i.e. blitzing and stunting from all angles on the defensive front. Please take note that whenever you do blitz, something is always left open for the opposing offense to exploit. So if we want an attack style defense then surely we need to have the althetism to get a quicker blitz into the earhole of the QB before he can exploit the vacant area the defender left behind. Or more athletism from the blitzing LBs teammates in order to squeeze down on the vacant area. Right now we just don’t have the required athletism to be creative enough to suit our wants and needs.

Our defensive woes are not due to schematics. We’re okay in that department. Coach Holt is one of the very best in the business. He knows defense inside and out. The problems we are dealing with right now in terms of our defensive play is more or less personnel issues. We lack athletism, speed, maturity, and defensive know-how. Those four categories make up “Talent”. We lack defensive talent in many areas on the defensive side of the ball.

So when you see us playing a cloud coverage, loose zone coverage and playing “Base” up front- it’s not that Nick Holt is not creative. It’s by design fellas. When you don’t have defensive talent nor defensive depth the best alternative is to try to minimize the damage the opposing offense can do. I’m buying in! How else do you explain it? Holt knew coming in that this defense was going to be challenging to try to slow down Pac 10 offenses. He basically said that in his initial press conference when hired. He knew from the get go that it was going to be rather difficult to stop folks consistently through out the Pac 10 grinding season. So what did Holt bring in to try to offset our lack of ability to make consistent stops? He didn’t develop this defense into a defensive stopper- it wouldn’t worked with the personnel we currently have. Instead he developed this defense into a big play defense. If you’ve noticed, we’ve struggled to stop folks on 3rd downs, its been rather discouraging at best. But have you noticed our turnover margin on defense? With basically the same personnel from the 0-12 season, Holt wasn’t going to be able to turn this thing around in one season. To turn the defense around into an attack stop-making defense requires his sort of players, or USC defenisve style players. Those fellas are coming, you can bet on that!

To criticize Nick Holt after one season with Ty and Donatell’s players is flat out rediculous! And if you don’t like Holt’s frown then I suggest you play intermurals. That is the look of championship football brotha- take a look at every coaches face on the USC sideline, every USC coach has that same look of passion, desire, and excitement.

It’s not the schematics that fail us, we just don’t have the talent to run those schemes and be successful at it right now. Wait…

We just don’t have the personel at the moment to run a real agressive D and be sucessfull. That will change as we recruit more speed and will give Holt more D schematic options. We all want to see the Dawgs blitz like hell and get after it but our D back field has gotten burned most of the times we’ve done this. As the personel gets better so will the schemes.