Oregon State Beavers fall in Seattle; eye Civil War
The Beavers fell behind early in Jonathan Smith’s return to Husky Stadium, and couldn’t make up enough ground or get the timely plays needed to make a comeback against Chris Petersen’s Washington Huskies.
Oregon State Beavers Football: Smith on loss to Washington
Oregon State Beavers Football: OSU players react to UW loss
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Oregon State head coach Jonathan Smith’s return to his former school didn’t go according to plan as the Beavers dropped their third straight contest by losing to the Huskies 42-23.
Washington seized control of the contest early as the senior tandem of Jake Browning and Myles Gaskin was just too much to overcome. The Beavers found themselves trailing 28-3 after the first quarter, and with UW’s defense keeping Jake Luton off-balanced all day, it became an uphill climb that the Beavers couldn’t manage.
Heading into the second quarter, the Beavers found themselves in a familiar position, down big early. However, just like we’ve seen from Smith’s resilient group all season, the Beavers didn’t quit, and continued to work their way back into the game.
“I thought the effort continued throughout the game, but our execution wasn’t good enough to play with a very good football team,” Smith said. “We had some opportunities to finish drives and we didn’t. We also could have been more efficient on third downs. (OSU went 2-of-14 on 3rd downs) Defensively, we made some adjustments at halftime, but at that point, we weren’t in a position to catch up from the slow start.”
That “slow start” that Smith referenced, has seemingly been the Beavers’ achilles heel all season. Whether it was Ohio State, Nevada, Arizona State, Colorado, Cal, USC, Stanford, and now Washington, the Beavers have been plagued by not coming out of the gates ready to roll.
“We’re going to go into every game thinking we’re going to play better in the first quarter,” Smith said. “These guys are preparing and we’re running into some good teams too. I think UW benefitted from a week off and they’re a really good football team.”
Linebacker Kee Whetzel, who had a team-high seven tackles against the Huskies, felt that the Beavers started much too slow and even though they have a comeback mentality, it was too much to overcome against a good Husky squad.
“Staying in the fight has never been our problem,” Whetzel said. “Throughout the entire season, our team has continued to fight and give maximum effort.”
The Beavers were able to make some strides in the second half, both offensively and defensively as multiple times, OSU was within striking distance of putting some real pressure on UW. Unfortunately, the Beavers weren’t able to overcome their first half miscues, even with a stout second half.
“The way we played defense in the second half, just goes to show that if we could put that together for a full game, we’ll be a really good team,” Whetzel said. “We won the special teams battle today and there’s positives to take from this game. We can’t be down too much because this a ranked team and you can’t beat yourself up too much. We’ve just got to focus on the next game.”
Added Smith: “There were a couple of tweaks that I thought helped us in the second half, but obviously it wasn’t good enough… In college football, the price of admission is playing hard Now, we just have to take it to a much higher execution level for longer periods of time. That continues to be the message.”
Moving forward, it now all comes down to one game… Following a 42-23 defeat at the hands of the Washington Huskies, the Oregon State football team now finds themselves with just one game left in the 2018 season.
The Civil War.
We’ve got to digest this thing tomorrow and get to work,” Smith said. “Oregon is a very good football team with a lot of good athletes. (Justin Herbert) is a very good player and I know him really well.”