What Washington coach Jedd Fisch said about loss to Ohio State

COLUMBUS — No. 1 Ohio State beat Washington to open Big Ten conference play on Saturday. Additionally, The Buckeyes snapped the Huskies 22-game home winning streak.

Following the game, Washington coach Jedd Fisch met with the media to discuss the loss. Here’s what Fisch had to say:

Fisch on Washington’s loss to Ohio State:

“I thought that our guys competed. It was a one score game going into the fourth quarter, 7-3 at halftime, 14-6 after we had one possession in the third quarter, one seven-play drive that ended in a field goal and then it they had the ball there. It felt like a very fast game. Didn’t feel like a lot of possessions.

“We weren’t very good on third down, which hurt us. We’re not accustomed to that. We got to a situation where we were in the red zone and we had some penalties, and that hurt us. We took some sacks, that hurt us. So some situational football that we’ve been good at, we struggled in this one. And when you play the number one team in the country, a team that they know how to win. They’ve won a lot. They win every year. And if you’re going to be able to finish the game and be able to win those games those penalties can’t happen, those sacks can’t happen, the mistakes that were made can’t happen. And we’re going to learn from that. We’re going to coach better, we’re going to play better, and we have an opportunity to go do that next week.”

Fisch on the Huskies struggles on 3rd down:

“We were 1-for-11, and probably on all 10 of them was a different breakdown, different issue. A couple of them that I think we converted on the fourth down after that. But for the most part, we just put ourselves in a position that we either had a protection breakdown, we had a coverage that we weren’t expecting, we didn’t win on a route or we wound up scrambling around. So it was everything.”

Fisch on the decision to blitz Ohio State on Julian Sayin’s touchdown to Jeremiah Smith:

“Yeah, it was 3-0 at that time, and we backed them up after a false start. And I think Coach Walt felt that we were going to be able to get one or two guys free on that pressure based on what we expected for them to do, protection wise, on third down and we didn’t get to the quarterback fast enough. And when that happens, even if you’re playing zero coverage behind it, you hope that somebody could be there to just make a tackle or save from a touchdown, and we weren’t in position to do that. And that was an unfortunate turn of events in that game.”