Between losses, bad jokes and a investigation, Jimmy Lake is feeling the heat from Husky fans

I’ve been a Coug since the fall of 1974 when I began my freshman year at Washington State. Which means I’ve been rooting against the Huskies for 47 years. I’m old school to the point of being really old school at this point, believing that you should always want your biggest rival to lose.

But you could make a good case for a Coug to pull for Washington in its game against Oregon last Saturday since it might help our chances to win the Pac-12 North. Yet I just couldn’t do it. I found myself rooting for the Ducks all night long.

For a Coug like me, the best thing that can happen at Washington is what’s happening now — complete chaos. The Huskies are not only a bad team, their fans are up in arms over their head coach, Jimmy Lake.

I love Husky angst, especially when there’s this much of it. Dawg fans are fed up with Lake after two questionable coaching decisions in a 26-16 loss to the Ducks.

I’ll give him a break on the first poor move. Some think that Lake struck one of his players, Ruperake Fuavai, with an overhand right on the sidelines. Lake later said he was just trying to separate Fuavai from a Duck player that he was having a heated verbal exchange with.

From two different video angles I saw of the incident, it appeared to me that if Lake struck Fuavai on his helmet, it was with some papers that were in his right hand. I viewed it as a coach trying to shoo his player away from getting an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty.

Did Lake follow the supposed strike to the helmet with a shove to Fuavai’s back? Yes, we all saw that.

Lake said after the game that we was merely trying to separate his player from the Oregon player. But the Huskies have launched a full-on investigation with athletic director Jen Cohen saying: “We have high expectations of the conduct of our coaches and we are working to gather more information on this matter.”

Call me an unenlightened caveman if you want, but back in my day what Lake did would have drawn a shrug by anyone who saw it, even if I’d been Fuavai’s dad. But now some Husky fans think it might be grounds for Lake’s dismissal, which is absurd.

Deep down they probably don’t really feel that way, they just want Lake to be fired for any reason at all because the Huskies haven’t lived up to their ridiculously high expectations. Let’s remember that this is Lake’s first full year as a head coach and there’s bound to be on-the-job growing pains.

But I agree with them when it comes to a ridiculous coaching decision with two minutes to go and the Huskies trailing 24-16, facing a fourth-and-10. Jimmy called for a punt, thinking that with two timeouts, the Dawgs could theoretically stop the Ducks from getting a first down and force them to punt.

Think about how dumb that kind of thinking was. The Husky defense couldn’t stopped the Oregon running game — the Ducks rushed for 329 yards on 5.9 yards a carry.

But just for the heck of it, let’s say the Ducks had to punt. The Huskies would have gotten the ball back inside their own 20 with around 50 seconds to go. With no timeouts, could you have envisioned the Huskies driving 80-plus yards and getting a two-point conversion and winning in overtime?

They had a better chance by going for it on fourth-and-10, but Jimmy showed a lack of guts by punting, and the football gods agreed. The Huskies couldn’t even get the punt off because the snapper air mailed the punter, and the ball went out the back of the end zone, giving Oregon a safety and an insurmountable 10-point lead.

There’s so much unrest on Montlake that the Dawgs fired offensive coordinator John Donovan on Sunday as Lake found a convenient scapegoat, perhaps only temporarily distancing himself from his own walking papers.

This capped a crazy week that started with Lake popping off about Washington’s supposed “academic prowess” over Oregon, saying in so many words that the Huskies are more inclined to recruit against the likes of Stanford and Notre Dame than Oregon.

It’s not only untrue, but he butchered the delivery with a grammatical error that made him sound not so smart himself.

On Monday we’ll hear from Lake again at his weekly news conference, addressing the Donovan dismissal, the ill-advised punt and more questions about whether he struck one of his players or not while Cohen continues her investigation.

The Dawgs are in disarray, looking down the barrel of a 4-8 season, the potential firing of their head coach and maybe, just maybe, a jarring defeat in the Apple Cup.

Jim Moore is a longtime Pacific Northwest sportswriter who writes a regular column for the Kitsap Sun and co-hosts a sports talk show, “Puck and Jim” on Sportsradio KJR from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Contact Jim at jimmoorethego2guy@yahoo.com and follow him on Twitter @cougsgo.

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Jim Moore: Complete chaos for Jimmy Lake and the Huskies