SEATTLE – University of Washington head coach Jimmy Lake has been suspended without pay one week for Saturday’s game against Arizona State for his actions on the sideline with a player against Oregon.
UW athletic director Jen Cohen announced Monday that defensive coordinator Bob Gregory as acting head coach.
“Our staff has spent the last 24-plus hours reviewing video of the incident, as well as speaking with coach Lake, the involved student-athlete and several other student-athletes and members of the staff, and I have made the decision to suspend coach Lake for next Saturday’s game against Arizona State,” Cohen said in a statement.
“President (Ana Marie) Cauce, our Faculty Athletics Representative, Alexes Harris, and members of our executive are in agreement that while we do not believe that his actions were intentional or deliberate, we can have no tolerance for a coach interacting with a student in the manner coach Lake did. We have high expectations of conduct for our coaches, and we will not shy away from those expectations.”
Lake will be suspended this week, meaning he cannot be a part of all football-related activities, with the suspension being lifted November 14.
On Sunday, the school announced that offensive coordinator John Donovan was relieved of his duties, effective immediately. Third-year wide receivers coach Junior Adams has assumed the play-calling duties with quality control assistant Payton McCollum elevated to quarterbacks coach for the remainder of the season.
Defensive coordinator Bob Gregory will serve as acting head coach Saturday against the Sun Devils. It will be the second time Gregory has held the interim title after he served as head coach for Boise State in the 2014 Hawaii Bowl, a 38-23 loss to Oregon State.
Both Gregory and Adams will speak with the media Monday afternoon. Lake will not be made available this week for his press conference or radio show.
Adams has previously been an offensive coordinator at Western Kentucky in 2017-18 before he came to Washington prior to the 2019 season. In his final season as OC the Hilltoppers averaged almost 21 first downs per game.
The Huskies average just over 18 first downs per game this season through nine games. UW had just seven total in the 26-16 loss to Oregon at home this past Saturday, eight fewer than their next lowest number of first downs (15 in the 27-24 loss at Oregon State in early October.
With the dismissal of Donovan several questions emerge.
Freshman quarterback Sam Huard has played in two games this season, against Arkansas State and at Arizona, with three games remaining on the schedule in 2021.
However, Huard has just two completions on six attempts for 31 yards in his brief appearances.
Sophomore starter Dylan Morris is currently fifth among Pac-12 quarterbacks averaging 213 yards per game. Morris also has the most interceptions among the top five signal-callers in the conference and the most picks overall among all quarterbacks in the league.
It has been the expectation that Huard would play in four games this season, which would allow him to preserve his redshirt while still getting his feet wet at the college level. The two games it has been assumed that the former five-star recruit would play are at Colorado and against Washington State to close out the regular season.
Should Morris struggle this weekend, would Adams be able to play Huard if he is also going to play the final two games and burn his redshirt?
The other overarching conundrum by suspending Lake for one game is it only pushes the ultimate decision back by at least one week.
If there is a determination that Lake is not going to return next season as head coach, which is the presumed understanding, determining how the program will move forward is pivotal.
Two days after the 2019 Apple Cup then-head coach Chris Petersen surprised the college football universe by announcing he was resigning. Petersen turned to Lake, who had served as an assistant at UW since 2014, to serve as the next head coach.
However, at his resignation press conference, Petersen did not put an absolute nail in the coffin on the potential that he would return to the sidelines at some point. He made it clear that he needed to take time away from the game to recharge and reinvest his energy in other facets of the sport.
Before the game against Oregon it was unveiled that Petersen was central in the creation of Montlake Futures, an organization focused on name, image and likeness that, while unaffiliated with UW, is central to the future of NIL and the school.
He has spent this fall serving as a studio analyst for Fox Sports, in addition to being a consultant for Cohen, while Petersen has continued to build the future at Washington.
