Ryan Grubb saw the whole thing coming.
51 points. 703 total yards. 30 first downs. Apple Cup carnage.
Prior to the 51-33 rivalry win over WSU, UW’s offensive coordinator effectively called his shot.
“Before the game in the locker room I was talking to (associate head coach JaMarcus Shephard) and (tight ends coach) Nick (Sheridan) and (offensive line coach Scott) Huff and (running backs coach) Lee (Marks) and I just said, ‘Man, I feel like we’re going to go off.’ I was very confident in the game plan that we had,” Grubb said Monday. “But at the same time, I had a ton of respect for their defense, because we knew to execute some of those (plays) we were going to have to do it at a really high level. We just felt really good about the game plan we had and the guys played confident.”
Understandably so. Redshirt junior Michael Penix Jr. — who leads the nation with 4,354 passing yards and 362.8 pass yards per game — connected on nine completions of 25-plus yards, including three touchdowns.
Given Penix’s resume, the reward outweighed the risk.
“If you guys saw him in practice you’d see that the number of times and percentage of hits he has in a week on deep balls is impressive, just as far as the completion percentage,” Grubb said. “So yeah, we felt really good about it. It was one of those things where (co-defensive coordinator) Chuck (Morrell) was saying up in the staff meeting earlier today, ‘You guys were quiet all week. Normally you’d say something (if you were confident).’ I was like, ‘Well, I felt good.’ But you just want to be quiet and see what happens, and we did.”
A whole lot has happened for a Husky offense that nearly doubled its scoring output, from 21.5 points per game in 2021 to 40.8 this fall.
Again, Grubb saw the whole thing coming.
And not just the Apple Cup.
“I had something written on my board since I got here: 41.3 (points per game),” Grubb, who signed a two-year extension last month, said on 93.3 FM KJR. “It’s still on there. You can go look at it if you want to. It’s on the top right corner of my board.
“Let’s be honest: There were some really good pieces in place when I got here. When I got here one of the things we identified was that we had the potential to have a really good offensive line. None of those guys came in from somewhere else. Those were all guys that were right here. Then a big part of it obviously was getting Mike (Penix) in here. He’s been a huge part of our success and a guy that already knew a good portion of our system. We felt strongly, with Mike having a strong offseason, that he could do what he’s doing right now.”
But what will Penix do next? Given his injury history, and prolific production this fall, the fifth-year junior may declare for the 2023 NFL draft.
But UW coach Kalen DeBoer does not consider that a foregone conclusion.
“I think there is (a chance Penix returns for a sixth and final season),” DeBoer said Monday. “I feel that he loves the game and loves college football. We’ve got a lot of great pieces around him that are going to be back. There’s a lot of optimism about what the offense could be, what our team could be.
“That’s for Mike to decide, and people are obviously reading into every word I say right now. But there’s nothing he’s articulated that makes me feel strong about (him returning). I just think that he hasn’t decided and has really tried to focus on playing every game and giving it his all.”
Indeed, Penix has committed to play in the Huskies’ as-of-yet unannounced bowl game.
Beyond that date, the future on Montlake is murky.
Penix said Monday that money — whether via an NFL contract or name, image and likeness deals — won’t be the deciding factor.
“As far as the potential earnings, I don’t feel like that’s the thing that would make me stay or leave,” he said. “As far as that aspect, I’m just going to trust in my heart that whatever decision I make is going to be the correct one. With NIL, for me, this season I had a couple opportunities to be a part of some NIL deals. But it wasn’t a lot, because it was never about the NIL for me. It was just about this team — helping this team win football games.”
No tiebreak tantrums
Despite sharing an identical 7-2 conference record with Oregon and Utah, the Utes won a tiebreaker to participate in Friday’s Pac-12 championship game against No. 4 USC (11-1, 8-1).
More specifically, Utah ultimately advanced because its conference opponents had a higher combined Pac-12 winning percentage (0.469) than UW’s (0.395) and Oregon’s (0.457).
The College Football Playoff rankings on Tuesday were more puzzling (if that’s possible), jumping the Utes three spots (from 14 to 11) over No. 12 UW … despite Utah’s win against 1-11 Colorado last weekend being undeniably less impressive than UW’s road triumph over 7-5 WSU.
In his annual state of the conference address Thursday, Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff sounded pleased with all of the aforementioned results.
“The Pac-12 was the first among the Power Five to move away from the divisional conference model to a qualification system where our two best teams, as measured be conference record, meet in our championship game,” Kliavkoff said. “This change was made in support of our goal to maximize CFP selections and ultimately win football championships. We are very pleased that the new format delivered a game between our two highest ranked teams this year, and we believe the new format will continue to pay dividends in years to come.”
Both outcomes — the tiebreaker result and the CFP ranking — could be interpreted as UW receiving the short end of the stick, especially considering the Huskies would have won the essentially dissolved North Division.
But DeBoer wasn’t willing to see it that way.
When asked if he believed the Pac-12’s top two teams earned invites to Friday’s championship game, DeBoer said: “It’s hard, because there’s a tie for the second spot. We’re in that tie. We all agreed on it before the season. Those are the rules and that’s what you’ve got to go with. We’d certainly love to see if we’ve got that type of team (to win the Pac-12 title). We feel we do, certainly. But we had our chances over the course of the year, right, and there’s two games that are in the loss column. We needed to have one of those not be the case for us to get what we deserve.
“It is what it is. We’ve just got to learn from it and make sure we don’t make ourselves vulnerable like that down the road.”
Note
- Penix has been named a finalist for the Manning Award (which honors college football’s premier quarterback) and a semifinalist for the Comeback Player of the Year Award. Sixth-year senior offensive linemen Jaxson Kirkland and Henry Bainivalu have also accepted invitations to the East-West Shrine Bowl.
