COLLEGE FOOTBALL : Huskies Play It Safe, End Up in Danger : Pac<i> -</i> 10: After confusing Trojans with mixed coverages, a late zone paved way for rally.

For three quarters Saturday, Washington sat in the driver’s seat for the Rose Bowl.

Thanks to a near-perfect game plan and some inspired defensive play, the Huskies began the fourth quarter with a 21-0 lead and had the Trojans guessing on offense.

“By mixing up our pass coverages, we had them right where we wanted,” Washington safety Lawyer Milloy said. “We were up by three touchdowns and had forced them to go solely to their passing game.”

That’s when Washington made its biggest mistake. Instead of keeping pressure on USC’s offense as they had for most of the game, the Huskies decided to play it safe and went exclusively to a zone defense in their secondary.

“Once we got them into a predictable passing situation, the game should have been in our favor,” Milloy said.

Instead, the Huskies sat back and watched USC finally get its slumbering offense in gear as the Trojans rallied for a 21-21 tie and control of the Pacific 10 Conference Rose Bowl race.

“This really hurts, because even though we ended up in a tie, it feels like a loss,” Milloy said.

And it should. With the tie, Washington must win the rest of its games and hope that the Trojans either lose or tie in order for the Huskies to travel to Pasadena on Jan. 1.

That’s why there were more frowns than smiles in the Huskies’ locker room afterward, no matter how positive Coach Jim Lambright tried to make the final score.

“Because people really didn’t think we’d be competing for the conference title in our first year [after a two-year probation],” said Lambright, whose record against USC is now 0-2-1, “I would say that our glass is almost full instead of half empty.

“But because of the way we started out for the first 2 1/2 quarters, this is a terrible disappointment.”

So, did Washington self-destruct or did USC simply play better in the fourth quarter?

“I think we hurt ourselves more than anything by giving up field position, and then they got on a heck of a good passing streak,” Lambright said. “We had a hard time shutting the passing down and getting some consistent pressure and containment. It was one of those things where you lose momentum and the other team is a good football team.”

A turning point came late in the third quarter when USC faced a third down and four from the Washington 18-yard line.

Up until then, the Trojans had converted only two of 10 third-down plays against Washington’s mixture of coverages, but USC converted this time with a 16-yard pass play from Brad Otton to Keyshawn Johnson against a full blitz by the Huskies.

That play signaled the end of Washington’s single coverage on Johnson.

With USC’s passing game clicking, the Huskies still could have won the game if their offense had moved the ball in the final quarter. But after punting only once for the first 38 minutes, Washington punted five of the last six times it had the ball.

Running back Leon Neal, a senior from Paramount, gave USC fits for the first three quarters by gaining most of his 152 yards rushing and 65 yards receiving. But in the fourth quarter, Neal struggled to find daylight.

“They knew we were going to try and run down the clock, so they started stunting inside,” Neal said.

The Huskies had a chance to end the game when they had the ball with less than four minutes to go in the fourth quarter, but they were unable to do so despite a key pass reception for a first down by Fred Coleman.

“That really killed us,” Neal said. “We needed to have better clock management down the stretch.”

Any way the Huskies look at it, the tie still feels like a loss. And if they don’t make it to the Rose Bowl, their glass was definitely not half full.