The UW fan base may be disgruntled, but that's different from disinterested.

At least, that's my conclusion from Tuesday's report that just over 65,000 tickets already have been sold for the Huskies' noon Saturday home game against No. 15 Brigham Young. That's just 2,000 short of what the Seahawks draw every Sunday at Qwest Field. And that despite the disappointing debut at Oregon, a very good but not all that glamorous opponent, and the fact that the game will be shown live on FSN.

A few other ticket figures provided by the UW sports information office:

¨ UW is 100 tickets shy of last year’s season tickets sold total (43,516 last year. 43,410 this year)

¨ They sold more than 1,600 more student tickets this year over last year (3,254 last year, 4,871 this year).

¨ They have sold almost 66,000 tickets for Oklahoma.

And by the way, the university has reached a one-year agreement with Starline Luxury Coaches and King Country Metro to continue providing free transportation to this season's seven home games, a tradition of more than two decades that had briefly seemed threatened.

Full details at gohuskies.com.

And a couple of other links:

My Wednesday story on defenses likely to force the Huskies to win through the air.

We had access to the Huskies offensive players and coaches today. So, not suprisingly, we heard from a lot of folks disappointed by the Huskies' sad little 10-point output at Oregon and who were saying all the right things about doing better this weekend when No. 15 Brigham Young visits. (The Cougars inched forward from No. 16 to a tie with Arizona State for 15th in the new AP poll announced today.)

A few samplings:

TYRONE WILLINGHAM:
We all had a role to play in what took place, and none of us did it the way that we wanted to, and the good news is that our team has a little bit of a feeling of letting each other down and letting our fan base down. We all share that, and to me those are all positive things that allow you to drive yourself to go forward.

(Willingham also reaffirmed his confidence in offensive coordinator Tim Lappano noting success of last season. Then added:) "We didn’t block, we didn’t do a lot of things, we didn’t throw as well as we would have liked to. And I’ve got to be a factor in there making sure that I assist him."

Offensive lineman JORDAN WHITE-FRISBEE
On the public criticism of the offensive line: It will definitely drive us. We talk about it all the time, this has to be the year. This game right here has to change it right now. We don’t have time to wait. This is it for us. We know how strong we are, and we’ve got to prove it.

True freshman tailback CHRIS POLK
We expected to do way better than we did. It’s a wake up call that we have to work way harder. ... I would say I messed up. There were holes, I just didn’t see them until later. I was getting to excited and getting impatient. There were some holes to run through, I just missed them.

Offensive line coach MIKE DENBROCK
We didn't play nearly as well as we anticipated we would. We knew going into the game that they may put us in a position where they stacked the line of scrimmage and we still thought we had the ability to run the football at them and we didn't get our job done as front.

I didn't get my job done as a coach, first and foremost, of making sure those guys were on top of every little detail they needed to be on top of and we didn't play all that great.

Offensive coordinator TIM LAPPANO
On opening up the playbook this week: "We've got some guys in their books right now. I think we'll be a little more wide open in this plan. You'll see some things you haven't seen in a while."

The first college football weekend of the new season could hardly have ended with a more exciting game. UCLA's overtime win over Tennessee last night was one of the most dramatic games I can recall... and that was in a pure football sense.

Then when you add in that it bought the Pac-10 some impressive bragging rights over the SEC, the personal drama of QB Kevin Craft's instant evolution from first-half goat to second-half hero, and -- of course -- the return of Rick Neuheisel ... well, what a game.

Here's a look from Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Plaschke.

And meanwhile, today brings our weekly conference call with the Pac-10 coaches. I'll pop back in later as any news develops from there.