The No. 18 Oregon Ducks (4-1, Pac-12 1-1) may have a break from playing this week, but that doesn’t mean there’s room to relax.
Come Oct. 13, the Ducks will face off against the No. 10 Washington Huskies and their senior quarterback, Jake Browning, at Autzen Stadium.
Head coach Mario Cristobal talked with the media Wednesday morning to take a look back on last weekend’s 42-24 win against Cal, talk about the team’s focus during bye-week and preview the highly-anticipated top-20 matchup between the Ducks and the Huskies.
“I think the bye-week for us comes at a very good time,” Cristobal said. “Sometimes you worry about a bye-week because you’re in a good rhythm and you don’t want to get off that rhythm. We maintain that rhythm by doing some good-on-good work, making sure the speed of the game is being practiced.”
After last year’s grueling 38-3 loss to the Huskies, an Oregon victory would mark the program’s first win against Washington (4-1, 3-0) in the past two years, including a 70-21 loss in the 2016 season.
The Huskies will be led by Browning, a senior out of Folsom, California. He is the school’s all-time leader in career passing yards (10,347) and touchdown passes (86).
Cristobal emphasized that he wants his defense to understand that in order to slow down the Huskies they have to make the pocket uncomfortable for Browning.
“You’ve got to disrupt the timing of the passing game, and that goes with affecting the receivers, affecting their routes, affecting the quarterback,” he said. “You’ve got to change the picture.”
In last weekend’s victory over the California Golden Bears, Oregon’s quarterback and Heisman candidate Justin Herbert completed 16-out-of 22 of his attempted passes for a total of 225 passing yards and two touchdowns.
The game was packed with successful big plays for Oregon, including outside linebacker La’Mar Winston Jr.’s scoop-and-score which helped propel the Ducks to a 28-10 halftime advantage over the Bears.
However, despite the ‘W,’ the game left Cristobal frustrated with Oregon’s efforts to stop the Bears in the red zone.
“The disappointing point about our coverage this past game was I didn’t feel we ran hard out there,” Cristobal said. “[I] wasn’t very pleased at all about the guys that did not run down there with the DNA, the toughness, the sense of urgency, the discipline that we teach that with. … We have to ramp up the competition. We can’t have them playing certain phases of the game and then all of a sudden our coverage teams take a break. That’s not the DNA of the program.”
With the week off, Cristobal said he’s demanding just as much focus from his team.
“[It’s] certainly not a week to take our foot off the gas,” Cristobal said. “I’ve seen bye weeks at places where everyone is in relax mode. I want it to be the opposite. I want to make sure that we’re early to class, early to tutoring appointments, everything else just goes with it. Just enhance the culture, enhance the standards, keep elevating it and making sure that they find a way to be successful in every single day.”
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