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Sept. 25, 1999 By Anthony Gimino SportsLine College Football Editor |
SEATTLE -- There was a lot of Gary Barnett-style football being played in Husky Stadium on Saturday … although most of was coming from the guy wearing the sweater.
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Upon his arrival as the coach at Colorado last winter, Barnett was anointed King of the Buffs, the rightful heir to the throne, the man who would once again make Colorado serious, tough, disciplined.
The anti-Rick Neuheisel, basically. Sweaters be damned.
But on Saturday, in this supposed grudge match between Neuheisel's former team and his current team -- Washington -- Neuheisel coached like a down-and-dirty veteran and not like a golden-haired pass-happy former quarterback.
The Huskies ran, ran again, and then ran some more to get their first win of the season and essentially out-Barnetting Barnett.
They ran like they haven't all season -- and for most of the past couple of seasons, actually -- in stuffing a 31-24 victory down Colorado's throat in front of 72,068 at Husky Stadium.
"That's been the plan all week," said running back Willie Hurst, who rushed for 85 yards and two touchdowns on 19 attempts.
"We scouted the tapes. In the games they won, the teams tried to spread them out and pass, and try some trick plays on them. The team that beat them, Colorado State, ran right at them, played smash-mouth football.
"We took the same initiative and got the job done."
The early season had been a mess for Washington, starting 0-2 for the first time since 1985. But on Saturday, in what could have been a messy emotional game, Neuheisel pushed all the right buttons … beginning with not making the game all about him.
Later, he would let the emotions surface. He got misty-eyed on the field as Colorado players lined up to give him a hug and choked up again when asked what the CU players meant to him.
"It was more difficult than I imagined to be on the field with all those kids who I'd been I their living rooms with," Neuheisel said. "When you spend so much time as I do with kids, you get attached. It's emotional, and if you haven't been in that situation then you ought to try it because it really is a neat thing to have that kind of feeling toward people."
He didn't know how it would play out, because upon his departure, he simply read the team a prepared statement, and then when he tried to call the players individually to further explain his decision, it was deemed tampering. Barnett suggested that Neuheisel was trying to recruit the Colorado players to Washington, a charge Neuheisel vehemently denies.
It all added up to a bad-blood feud, although it didn't play out that way on the field. Nothing cheap. Nothing dirty. Yet the Neuheisel vs. Colorado theme was dominant all week.
Neuheisel twisted that around to his advantage, not asking his new players to win one for the coach, but telling them to win one for them.
"Everybody had made this out to be like that Burger King commercial, that there were going to be 11 guys coming after me trying to blow me up," Neuheisel said. "I told them, 'I ain't playing.' "
"The whole week, everyone was hoopin' and hollerin' about Neuheisel vs. Colorado," Hurst said. "I didn't know Coach had any eligibility left. We were hardly mentioned. So we figured we'd give everybody a reason to mention us."
After last week's loss to Air Force, the coaching staff had second-guessed itself about not being persistent enough with the run. They made sure there were no such doubts this week.
The Huskies didn't run the ball great, but they were stubborn about it, rushing 52 times for 205 yards. Colorado ran only 25 times ... or about as many times as they ran a screen pass. The screen pass: Not exactly the tough-stuff of Barnett's RTD promise -- Return to Dominance.
"We couldn't march the length of the field and we did not make a lot of big plays on offense, which we have been living off of in the past couple of weeks," Barnett said. "You take away the big plays and you have to be able to run the ball, which we obviously couldn't do."
Colorado did go up 21-14 in the third quarter, thanks to cornerback Ben Kelly's fumble return for a touchdown (he also had a sensational 98-yard kickoff return for a touchdown), but Washington stayed with its game plan and started having success with play-action passes. One of those -- a 38-yard bomb from Marques Tuiasosopo to Gerald Harris -- gave the Huskies a 24-21 lead early in the fourth.
The Buffaloes soon tied it, and then Washington ground out what would be the game-winning drive, mixing in another nifty play-call. Facing third-and-1 -- earlier in the game Colorado blitzed in a similar situation, causing a fumbled exchange that led to Kelly's return -- Washington went to a play-action pass to a wide-open tight end for a first down.
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| Chris Juergens catches the game-winning touchdown pass in the fourth quarter.(AP) |
In another veteran move, Neuheisel credited his offensive coaches (who include two former head coaches in Keith Gilbertson and Steve Axman) for the on-the-fly adjustments. Was there anything he didn't do right Saturday?
Let's see: Had a great game plan, stuck with it through adversity, had his team emotionally ready to play an emotional game, doled out credit, had another fabulous hair day, looked good in the sweater. That's just about everything.
And, oh yeah, about that little rift between him and Barnett? Well, the hatchet probably isn't buried, but they gutted out a pre- and postgame handshake, albeit brief. Neuheisel described their meetings as "professional."
But mostly, it was personal.
"It definitely was not just another game," said receiver Chris Juergens, who caught the game-winning touchdown pass with 3:17 left.
"You could feel how much it meant to Coach Neuheisel, and he tried to take the attention off himself but after the game he just let it out and you could see how much it meant to him. We were all excited, but to see the coaches jumping up and down makes it that much greater."