Inside The Huskies

Even When the Huskies' Michael Penix Jr. is Bad He's Very Good

The UW quarterback comes off his lowest passing percentage game to face the Beavers.

Dan Raley

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Michael Penix Jr. has been so productive and swashbuckling for the unbeaten and fifth-ranked University of Washington football team this season and last, it largely escaped notice that this past weekend he suffered through his worst passing effort in 23 games as a Husky.

Oh, how will this extra cool, ever accurate lefty ever recover?

Against Utah and in buffeting winds coming off Lake Washington, Penix was good on 24 of 42 passes for 332 yards and 2 scores, with no interceptions, which on the surface looks like real positive stuff for any self-respecting Power 5 quarterback.

Yet when compared to his usual unflappable and pinpoint body of work in the Husky pocket, Penix's 57.1 completion rate coming out of a physical, hard-earned 35-28 victory over the Utes was a two-season low for him.

This passing outing eclipsed his previous bottom-end number of 57.7 precent registered against Oregon State in 2022, when Penix was on target of 30 of 52 passes for 408 yards and 2 touchdowns, with a pick-6 interception, in a 24-21 win over the Beavers in Seattle — again battling severe wind gusts from start to finish.

"It got away from me maybe a couple of times, but not too bad," Penix said, surrounded by TV cameras and phone-wielding media types, of his windy Utah outing. "Like I said, I don't let any circumstances ... I don't make any excuses for my circumstances. If the weather was snowing, it don't matter."

To be bad as Michael Penix Jr. is almost laughable, make that incredibly silly. He's still outperforms nearly every quarterback he's faces at a much higher level, if not the entire collection of FBS signal-callers trying weekly to keep up with his overall production.

With three weeks to go in the Heisman Trophy race, Penix remains the leader in most people's eyes. He still leads the nation in total yardage by a wide margin (3,533 to Caleb Williams' 3,249) and in passing yardage per game (353.30). His Huskies (10-0 overall, 7-0 Pac-12) remain unbeaten and poised for Pac-12 championship and College Football Playoff berths.

While he'll leave the Montlake wind behind this weekend, Penix faces the possibility of launching the football in a steady Willamette Valley downpour on Saturday afternoon against 10th-ranked Oregon State (8-2, 5-2). 

"I can't make no excuses," Penix  said. "I've got to find ways to get my guys the ball. That's one of the main things is just giving those guys a chance, knowing that I've got the best guys in the nation and they'll make a play."

In his 23 outings, Penix has finished seven games with completion rates in the upper 50-percent range, six games of 60 percent or more, nine games of 70 percent or higher and one outer-worldly outing in which hit 81.8 percent — with 36 of 44 passes for 516 yards and 4 touchdowns against Arizona in 2022.

At Washington in two seasons, Penix holds a 66.4 career percentage so far by connecting on 611 of 920 passes for 8,174 yards and 59 touchdowns, with 15 interceptions.

Counting his time at Indiana, the flinging Floridian has a six-season college passing line of 953 completions in 1,496 attempts for 12,371 yards and 88 scores, with 30 interceptions, which should be way more than enough of a sample for NFL scouts to sort through. 

His Utah outing actually was just the lowest percentage of consistently high ones and nothing more, hardly an off day. Outside of the occasional turnover and two games in which the Huskies lost by a score each time out over his two seasons, Penix has been been as good as it gets.

After all, Oregon State previously saw him at his previous statistical worst and see where that got the Beavers.

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Dan Raley
DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.

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