Luke Falk Through Week 2
Washington State sits at mildly disappointing 1-1 on the season, and not with the win and loss that most would have expected. Regardless, a road victory, and sweet revenge, over Rutgers has this team feeling fine and looking forward to a showdown with Wyoming in Pullman this Saturday night.
Every game is dissected to the core. Offense, defense, special teams, play-calling, clock management, turnovers, etc. Arm chair quarterbacks everywhere can point to their keys to the game, what they saw, and what needs to improve. We are not doing that today. We are strictly looking at Luke Falk’s performance after 2 games of the 2015 season. So how has he done?
Pretty damn good, actually.
“Against Rutgers we saw a much more decisive quarterback.”
After 8 quarters of football Falk is the 3rd leading passer in the nation with 767 yards amassed. That is to be expected given the returning offensive line and plethora of receiving talent. Falk currently is the FBS leader in completions (74) and attempts (107). He has 6 touchdowns on the year and ZERO interceptions. It is unrealistic to expect him to not give one up eventually, but for right now you can’t get much better than zero. Lastly, and probably most important, WSU has given up one sack. One!!! That is good for a sack rate of 0.0093% against attempts so far, which is an astronomically low number.
Let’s compare that sack rate to a couple other PAC-12 quarterbacks after two games:
- Vernon Adams Jr., 5 sacks on 64 attempts (7.8%)
- Sefo Liufau, 4 sacks on 64 attempts (6.3%)
- Jake Browing, 4 sacks on 58 attempts (6.9%)
- Cody Kessler, 5 sacks on 57 attempts (8.8%)
- Mike Bercovici, 10 sacks on 76 attempts (13.2%) yikes..
Question marks surrounded Falk’s performance against Portland State, mainly concerning his hesitation and decision-making. So much that Leach dialed back the offense to simplify his decisions. Against Rutgers we saw a much more decisive quarterback. Reads were made properly (for the most part) and the ball was delivered to the flat when the running back was the safest option. One such delivery resulted in a touchdown pass to Keith Harrington.
I do not expect Luke to challenge Halliday’s 734 yards in one game, in fact that record may never fall. But I do expect his steady play to continue. Wyoming has surrendered 72 points on defense this season, and that was against North Dakota and Eastern Michigan. Going over 500 yards this week in the air is reasonable if not probable.
Even if Falk stays at his average of 384 yards per game with 3 touchdowns, no picks, and likely no sacks, I will certainly take it. But I say get greedy.