UW vs Illinois Game Awards

Player of the Game: Bishop Sankey, and there's no question. He followed his opening performance of 161 yards and 2 TDs with a 208 yard 1 TD showing, and he added 3 catches for 63 yards and another TD. Sankey is quickly becoming one of the top backs in not just the conference, but the country.

Goat of the Game: I hate to give it to Austin Seferian-Jenkins again, but this time he was actually deserving. His performance was pretty bad, as he caught 3 passes for just 8 yards, while adding three penalties. Two of the penalties were holds that brought back big plays by the UW offense. It's probably just rust, and he'll get better, but this was the worst performance in ASJ's career to date.

The Game Turned When: Coming out in the second half, the initial gameplan for the Huskies was to run the ball down the throat of the Illini defense. It worked. The Huskies put together a drive that consisted of 7 combined runs from Sankey and Jesse Callier for 75 yards and a touchdown. They did not throw a pass. That drive seemed to wake the offense up in terms of putting points on the board.

It Was Over When: On their comeback attempt, Bill Cubit reached into his bag of tricks for the three thousandth time in the game (approximate) and dialed up a throwback double pass. The Husky defense had seen enough of the trickeration at that point, and Gregory Ducre picked off a pass that had no shot and never should have been thrown. The Dawgs held their two score lead and would run out the clock on the ensuing drive.

Surprise of the Game: The UW pass defense. I don't know that we expected Nathan Scheelhaase to go off on UW, but I think the expectation was that he'd do a little bit better than he did: 9/25 for 156, 1 TD and 1 INT. They did get burned on a few plays deep (and fortunately, Illinois had a bit of a problem with drops), but they have now held the two QB's they've played to an average of 154 yards.

WTF Moment of the Game: Dwayne Washington had two carries. Dwayne Washington had two fumbles. After getting 13 carries, 52 yards and a touchdown in the opener, it looked like Washington had carved out a spot as the #2 back on the squad, now he might be falling down the depth chart. Jesse Callier took advantage of Washington's issues and reminded us that, oh yeah, this kid was pretty good before the ACL tear (96 total yards and a touchdown on 8 touches), but you don't want to see a young guy have that kind of game. You wonder: was it a one time thing, or is it an issue? Was it not an issue before, and now that it happened on a somewhat big stage it becomes a complex? Let's hope it was just a one time thing, because Washington can be a big contributor on this team.