Notre Dame Steamrolls Ty and the Huskies

Irish beat Washington 33-7 to improve to 5-2

By TOM FORNELLI

Updated 7:59 AM CST, Sun, Oct 26, 2008

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While the Notre Dame Fighting Irish have made some vast improvements this season compared with last year's debacle, they still had a few things to work on going into their game at Huskie Stadium on Saturday night. First and foremost, the team wanted to get it's first victory outside the loving arms of Touchdown Jesus and the Irish faithful. Of course if they were to do that they were going to have to improve on defense where they've given up 20.7 points a game, and an average of 367.7 yards per game and a ground attack probably wouldn't hurt either.

The Irish did all three against the Huskies.

Notre Dame beat Washington 33-7, and the game wasn't even that close. The Irish defense held the Huskie offense to 124 total yards, and 69 of those yards came on a meaningless touchdown drive while they trailed 33-0 and the Irish had brought in the second string. As for the running game, after Charlie Weis said earlier this week that he wasn't going to force the issue on the struggling ground attack, he did the opposite.

The Golden Domers ran the ball 49 times for 247 yards and three touchdowns. This after averaging only 101 yards a contest going into the game.

Now the real question here is whether this is a sign that the Irish are starting to fire on all cylinders, or was it more a result of the fact that the Washington Huskies are a very bad football team. Former Notre Dame head coach Tyrone Willingham is soon to become the former head coach at Washington as well, as every day there's a new report that he's going to be fired. The Huskies are now 0-7 on the season, and they looked as though they'd already given up after the Irish jumped out to a 14-0 lead early in the first quarter.

Still, even if this complete victory had more to do with the opposition than it did the Irish, it's still a good sign for Notre Dame. Good teams not only win close games, but in this day and age of college football where huge upsets are a weekly occurrence, it's just as important to take care of the teams you're supposed to beat.

The Irish did that on Saturday night, and hopefully they can continue to do it over the final five games.