Huskies buried again in 33-7 loss to Irish

The school that fired Tyrone Willingham four years ago might have gotten him fired again Saturday.

Or, at least, delivered the final blow to a Washington coaching tenure that has been teetering on the edge for some time.

Saturday's 33-7 loss to Notre Dame, the team Willingham coached for three seasons before being fired and coming to UW, not only bordered on offensive ineptitude of historic proportions for most of the night but also made official what has long seemed inevitable.

There will be no bowl game this year for the Huskies, now 0-7 with five games left. No winning season. No sign of any kind of progress. And there's no doubt about where things are now headed.

Washington athletic director Scott Woodward has said several times he did not "foresee" making a coaching change during the season.

But he hasn't completely ruled it out, and that also doesn't eliminate the possibility of a resignation of some sort. Only the details now seem in question.

Afterward, however, Willingham again held a stiff upper lip.

"Right now, the thing we have to do is just [talk about] basic pride," he said. "We've got to step up as coaches and players, all of us step up and do a better job, because this was not a good performance."

It was UW's ninth loss in a row dating to last season, the longest streak since the Huskies lost the first nine of the 1969 season.

And Saturday, they managed one first down for every one of those defeats, with only a scoring drive in the final minutes keeping the game from going down as the worst in UW offensive history.

The Huskies had only 55 yards and four first downs and didn't get past their own 44-yard line until a 21-yard completion with 6:03 left from Ronnie Fouch to Cody Bruns finally got them past midfield.

Fouch ended the drive by hitting D'Andre Goodwin with a 6-yard TD pass that averted UWs first home shutout since 1976.

"There was nothing that we really did well tonight," Willingham said of the offense.

Washington finished with just 124 yards, the team's fewest since getting 113 in a 38-0 loss at USC in 2004.

The Huskies struggled to move the ball against an aggressive Notre Dame team that used the bye week to implement several new blitzes that caught the Huskies and redshirt freshman QB Fouch off-guard.

"It's not that we didn't try or anything," said offensive coordinator Tim Lappano. "We got beat physically at times up front and in the backfield on all the pressures, and there were other times that we dropped balls that took us out of drives. It was disappointing because I thought we were growing a little bit in the passing game."

The Huskies punted the first nine times they had the ball -- or every possession until the last one.

Notre Dame scored TDs after the first two, all but salting the game away before the first quarter was halfway gone.

A 51-yard inside screen pass from Jimmy Clausen to Michael Floyd made it 7-0 with 12:35 left in the first quarter, and a 21-yard run on a reverse by Golden Tate made it 14-0 with 7:48 left. The Huskies defense stiffened a bit from there, but with the offense struggling it hardly mattered.

Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis, whose team improved to 5-2, thought the early scores were the key to the game.

"When you have a team that's wounded, if you let them hang around you can put yourself in a very vulnerable position," he said. "We felt today it was important in the first quarter to get on top of them."

Washington safety Nate Williams said the team might have been a little too excited in the early going. Each of the first two Notre Dame TDs basically took advantage of Washington's aggression.

"I think everyone just came out a little too pumped," Williams said. "We are on ESPN2 and it's Notre Dame and everyone was making a huge deal about it all week. After the first two possessions we calmed down and showed everybody what we are capable of doing."

Still, it was a rout in every way imaginable. Notre Dame gained 459 yards despite basically taking the pedal off the gas midway through the third quarter, and outrushed the Huskies 252-26.

Most of the 70,437 in attendance had filed out by the time UW scored. By that time the angle of Willingham facing his former team had faded into irrelevance.

"Being 0-7 is about as low as it could possibly be," said fifth-year senior tight end Michael Gottlieb. "It's definitely frustrating. It's hard. These losses pile up on you, and it's a weight on you and it's not easy to keep your head up. But it's a chance for us to really show our character in tough times."

Times that may only get tougher as the Huskies prepare to face USC next Saturday in Los Angeles.

Bob Condotta: 206-515-5699 or bcondotta@seattletimes.com.