Washington Wolfpack Playbook: Week 3

The Washington Wolfpack enter their bye week this week riding high. They're coming off their first win of the year - a come from behind effort against the Oregon Lightning. For the second straight week, the team saw themselves in an early hole. However, Coach JR Wells kept the messaging consistent and helped them dig out. 

"One of the biggest things for this game was - and no shade to the Oregon Lightning, they have a great program -  but we were playing down to their level. I had to remind the guys, stop playing Oregon Lightning football and start playing Washington Wolfpack football," Coach Wells explained. "And that's by executing, doing our job and taking care of the things that we can. That's our attitude, our energy, and our composure. We had to change that thing around and we've seen what the outcome was."

The COmeback

A big piece of that comeback was the switch to Ed Crouch at quarterback. The experienced indoor quarterback tossed four touchdowns and changed the vibe of the team in a big way. Coach Wells said, he saw it coming all along. 

"Ed is a phenomenal quarterback, an exciting leader, and he does the grunt work," he said. "We've seen that during the last few days of preparation towards Oregon. We just got to a point where last series I looked across the field and Ed looked at me, I looked at him, and it was just a head nod of knowing it was time to go."

The quality performance from Crouch may have just been the tip of the ice berg. Being that he only had a few days to prepare, there is likely going to be a more robust playbook in front of him when they emerge from their bye week. That's a fact that Wells believes should have the whole league on notice. 

"We prepared him with two days in, you know, just some basic fundamentals of what the offense does and then once it was his series, he just kind of like laid it out for him, just brick by brick, brick by brick. Then before you know it, I just started throwing a few things at him and I've seen how fast he picked it up," Wells said. "We're just, just getting started with him. He loves this game. We went out to celebrate kind of deal, and we're watching film in the out place. It's just being a leader of the game and knowing that it's 0-0. Just because we got a W, we have to make sure that we remind ourselves that we've been here before and to know that it's not the only one that we're going to get."

Locked In

Despite coming out with a big win and having a couple weeks to get ready for the next one, the Wolfpack aren't taking their foot off the gas. Coach Wells was interested to see how they would handle the position they're in, and his guys rose to the occasion. 

"Today we were in weight training and that was one of the things I wanted to notice was you're in a bye-week. How do you carry yourself? You'll notice in a lot of programs, bye-weeks guys are kind of checked out. They know they have a few days of recovery and just chilling," he explained. "But these guys are fired up. They're ready to go. They know what challenges we have ahead of us, the teams that we're going to face. And I said this already, every team in this league is a challenge for sure. So the guys are dialed in. They're ready to rock and roll and we're ready to get back on the field."

The Wolfpack take the field against during Week 4 as they face the Billings Outlaws. That game is on Thursday, April 3rd and will be available to stream on EvergreenNOW!