Seattle sports teams made the most of their moment in the spotlight, sweeping the two games that most people were watching on Friday night. Though they needed 15 innings to do it, the Mariners finished off the Detroit Tigers in the decisive game five of the American League Division Series.
Meanwhile 5.5 miles north, Washington spotted Rutgers the first 10 points, went into the second half down 13-10, but wound up trouncing the Scarlet Knights 38-19 anyway. It was indeed the Demon Williams Jr. show, as he passed for 402 yards, and ran for another 136. As he’s just a sophomore, his NFL Draft stock report will come down the road.
His backfield mate, senior running back Jonah Coleman, was an essential component to Williams success, despite the fact that his numbers were nowhere near as gaudy. Coleman did tack on another rushing touchdown though, his 11th of the year, and that extended his national lead in that statistic.
No one else is in double digits at this point. Coleman is also 13th nationally in rushing yards (538), on the strength of his solid 5.4 yards per carry average. Washington came out on offense, on Friday night, with an uncharacteristic series that had a lot of option calls.
In this unconventional approach, on the opening drive, we saw Williams and Coleman make big runs off of play calls that elements of 20 series and 40 series runs in the veer package. While NFL offenses will obviously not be utilizing packages similar to this, these drives did showcase Coleman’s ability to
1.) set the edge and
2.) be versatile, and adapt to the system.
Rutgers keyed so hard on Coleman, a player with almost exact height, weight and speed to Emmitt Smith when he was a NFL rookie that Williams was able to have an utterly explosive evening.
Not saying Coleman will be the next Emmitt Smith, as that’s obviously a sky high player comp, but he should easily be a day two pick, and one of the top running five backs off the board.