With a bye on tap this weekend, a fairly sleepy day out here in terms of news.

The team practiced without pads and in shorts and there didn't appear to be any new injuries or anything of that sort.

This was the one day this week when players and assitant coaches are available to talk.

Most notable from the assistant coaches might have been Tim Lappano launching an impromptu defense of the team's decision to play Terrance Daily and Cody Bruns last week and Ed Donatell talking about charges from the Arizona sideline that the defense quit. UA running back Nic Grigsby made the charge in this story in the Times Sunday.

First, Lappano.

The UW's offensive coordinator interrupted an early answer to a different question to say that he wanted to clear some things up about the moves with Daily and Bruns.

"It seems like the hot topic here is Cody bruns and Terrance Dailey,'' he said. "And I thought I said right after the game that both of those kids wanted to play. .... We're not going to put someone in the game until they are ready to play and Cody wasn't ready to play early because of the injures. And we have seven games left. We are going to do eveything we can to get these guys fundamentally as sound as we can, give them as good a scheme as we can to let them go play and they are gonig to be better and better and better every week, and next year at this time they should be ready to go. And if you are going to redshirt them all, you are going to face this for another coupel of years. They have to play. The only way they are going to get better is to play. We don't have anybody else at receiver, ... so that being said, we've got to play with these guys. We had two walk-ons out there Saturday night and Cody wanted to play.''

''Terrance Daily, if you ask any player on this football team, he has the stuff to make us get going on our running game ... Jake (Locker) and Louis (Rankin) are gone now, we've lost two great players and Terrance Dailey can break some tackles. ... He brings something to the table as far as acceleration and make you miss, so we've got to be able to rep him up this week and next week and get him going and use him a lot more than we did Saturday.''

As for why Bruns didn't play until the second half, Lappano said: "We didn't want to throw him out there in the very beginning. We didn't foresee the second half being basically over, either, we didn't want that either. But we didn't want to put him out there early in the first quarter, especially with the field position we got. But Cody is going to play a lot of football. We've got seven games and he's going to play a lot of football for us and we need slot receivers.''

Lappano also said that he doesn't envision taking the redshirt off of Anthony Boyles, saying "in my opinion, right now, he still isn't ready, and that's a guy we can probaly save. We are not going to just throw some kid to the wolves. We do care about the integrity of Husky football and these kids, these freshmen we recruited. So we are not throwing anybody to the wolves.''

Lappano also said that the Huskies won't practice as physically during this bye week as during the previous one because of all the recent injuries. "It won't be like it was a couple weeks ago when we banged for three straight days,'' he said. "We don't have the bodies.''

Lappano also said that the team plans to get Kavario Middleton more involved but that the return of Michael Gottlieb has taken away some of his time.

NOW ON TO DONATELL who said that while he didn't think his players quit, it's also not a good thing when a player on another team levies such a charge.

"If somebody does feel that way, we feel bad. We don't want people to feel that way, that's an indictment on us.We surely wouldn't want somenbody to feel that way and our goal is the opposite of that. (We want them) to talk off and say 'this is a hard bunch of playing guys who were after my butt every second and I want to get out of here.' He didn't say that, so we want to change that.''

Donatell said he didn't think the players quit, saying "not really, no, I didn't'' and saying that there were a lot of new players on the field at the end of the game. "I thought they were battling pretty good,'' he said.