Friday, December 30, 2011

Alamo Bowl: Baylor 67, Washington 56

The Alamo Bowl was certainly fun to watch in the way that Arena football is fun to watch: lots and lots of offense.

The Seattle Times entitles its description of the game "Huskies Score 56 Points But Still Can't Beat Baylor", which sums up the downside of all that offense: the Husky defense did not play well at all. Baylor is no better than Oregon on offense and yet they managed to hold Oregon to 34 points. It is true that they suffered from the loss of one of its starting linebackers in the middle of the first half, but still. It will be interesting to see what steps coach Sarkisian takes in the off-season to deal with the defense, which has been the weak side of the ball pretty much all season. Will Nick Holt survive?

Still, Baylor's defense is bad too, and Keith Price put on quite an offensive show. It was great for him to get a chance to show off in front of a national TV audience. He looked as good Baylor's Heisman Trophy award winning quarterback for most of the game. And Washington was in it until the very end. Change one or two plays, particularly the Chris Polk fumble in the red zone in the third quarter, and the game goes the other way.

This season went by quickly indeed, and was not quite as successful as I had hoped, but the derivative is still positive. The Huskies are good now, but not great. Hopefully next year they can make some progress toward the next level.

1 comment:

Jeremy said...

Baylor beat the spread as well. Washington's fumble on the kickoff return helped keep the lead above 9 points.