Scrutiny part of job for UW's Willingham.

Byline: Wendy Carpenter

Nov. 1--It's been a rough few weeks for University of Washington coach Tyrone Willingham.

His team is in the midst of a six-game losing streak, which includes letting a 15-point lead slip away in the fourth quarter Saturday in a 48-41 loss to Arizona. That left the Huskies (2-6 overall, 0-5 Pacific-10 Conference), who play at Stanford (3-5, 2-4) on Saturday, as the only Pac-10 team without a conference win.

But being scrutinized is nothing new for Willingham.

"There has been no time in my career for one reason or another that the heat hasn't been on Tyrone Willingham," the third-year UW coach said Wednesday. "When I took the job at Stanford, the heat was on. When I took the job at Notre Dame, the heat was on. Here the heat is on. The only thing that solves any of those problems is just winning football games."

But in the absence of winning, many Huskies fans have been critical of several elements of the team, including questioning whether Willingham should keep his job. But the coach said he thinks the team isn't far from turning things around.

"We're a football team that is very close to (winning) an awful lot -- no matter how you cut it, what you look at, what statistic you look at, this football team has played good football," Willingham said. "Now we may not have played it long enough to win particular ballgames but we've played good football, and we've got to shore up all of those areas where we're weak at and we'll do a lot of winning."