Chris Petersen: Huskies want opponents worried about trick plays

After the Huskies’ win in the Pac-12 title game, coach Chris Petersen said he ran into Jim Leavitt, Colorado’s defensive coordinator. Washington had just dropped 41 points on the Buffaloes.

“He’s like, ‘We practiced those trick plays all week long and you didn’t even run them,'” Petersen recalled when he joined “Brock and Salk” Wednesday. “He goes, ‘I know you like to hear that’ and I just smiled at him. I do. I do want to hear that.”

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Since masterminding the Statue of Liberty play that led his heavy underdog Boise State team over Oklahoma in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl, Petersen has been known as the trick-play guru. He’s also sprinkled in surprise plays throughout his three years at UW. As Petersen’s Huskies prepare for the College Football Playoff semifinal against undefeated juggernaut Alabama, Petersen explained why the trick play, and the threat of it, has become a staple of his offense.

“I hesitate to even get into the strategy behind it but I will talk about it a little bit because I think it’s so funny because people don’t get it. And I don’t want people to get it,” he said. “When we were Boise and became like Trick Play University because of the Fiesta Bowl (when) we ran three that we kind of had to against Oklahoma to make them work, so it was on this big stage, but if you look back at that season, we probably ran one or less than one a game,” he said. “And so we’re talking about, how many plays, like 900 plays during a season and we might run less than 20, maybe 15 deceptive type plays. But yet everybody’s like, ‘That’s all they do is run trick plays.’ And so over the years, people think about that and it softens them up and they’re like, ‘You’ve got to be ready for this’ and they’re practicing all this stuff.”

“To run trick plays back to back, and it’s like, ‘Oh, here they go, why are they doing that?’ We want them to think that we’re all about that. I love that,” Petersen added. “And then we’re gonna go run our offense, which is running the ball and hard-nose football.”

Much has been made about the head coach matchup of Petersen and Alabama’s Nick Saban, who has won five national titles. Petersen said he expects the Crimson Tide to be extremely prepared as always. But Petersen said this is not a battle of coaches.

“There are just so many good coaches out there these days,” Petersen said. “I think it’s like really rare if you’re playing whoever an opponent and you’re like, ‘These guys aren’t coached very well.’ You don’t say that, you don’t see that. I think so much of this comes down to having really good players that fit your system and you get them to buy into what you’re all about. Like I look at Alabama and everybody knows that Nick Saban is one of the best coaches in the history of college football, if not the best. Everybody knows that. But one of the things that I marvel at at his system is whatever their recruiting process is, how they get those guys.”

Here are other highlights from the conversation:

On the hectic schedule: “We’ve got the biggest games we’ve ever played and going against one of the best teams we’ve seen in a long, long time, so we’re kind of onto that next task at hand and then you factor in that recruiting thing. We lost a week of recruiting not being out, which was last week, and so this week we’re out and about and then it goes dead for a month and then when we come back it’s only about two and a half weeks, and so that’s really hard. That’s hard to fit everybody in for me because I try to get to everybody that we’re recruiting. There’s just so much work to be done, it’s hard to sit back and go, ‘Yeah, this is great.'”

On the importance of talking to the team about current events: “We just try to make it more than just football … On Friday nights, I will talk a lot of times about what is going on in the world and they appreciate it and they get it. We know we are playing this huge game tomorrow and we’ll talk about stuff that’s going on in the real world and they like it.”

On potentially practicing against the Seahawks: “Those guys are great guys and they’d probably like to kick us around a day or something, maybe take some frustrations out, although I don’t think they have too many frustrations going these days. They seem to be playing at a pretty high level.”

How to approach an opponent with so much talent: “It’s just a team that is notorious for being as prepared as anybody in the country. That’s what they pride themselves on. And they are the most prepared team always. And then you couple that with these phenomenal players, it’s a hard thing to matchup against. But it’s not going to be any one thing. It’s going to be a combination of all little things. You’ve got to do what you do. We can’t change our whole scheme and come out with something completely different. That would work backward against us.”

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