Stanford faces one of the most daunting tasks of the David Shaw era as head coach of the Cardinal: Reverse a two-game streak of offensive inefficiency against arguably the best defense in the country.

Washington's defense gives up 11 points a game and the Huskies are looking to establish dominance of the North Division for the second straight year.

Stanford staggered to only 18 first down plays in Pullman against the Washington State defense and, despite repeated negative rushes on first and other downs, the Cardinal persisted to hand the ball to Bryce Love. Stanford ran on 13 of those 18 plays.

Only one of the four passes attempted on a first down were completed and there was one sack.

"It was not a good game by me," Shaw said Tuesday. "It was not good. There are all the excuses I hate to hear from other people. I hate excuses -- ‘We were backed up a couple times, we were trying to establish the run, we got positive field position, we wanted to crack a run like we did.’ But the bottom line is we have to do a better job of mixing it up."

Stanford gained only 3.7 yards per first down play and Love had negative yardage on four first down plays.

It's only going to get tougher Friday. But the Cardinal may be able to look back on previous performances this season to see reason for hope and how just small changes could make a big difference.

"I really go back to bottling up the ASU game, the UCLA game (and) the joint effort at Utah wasn't exactly what we wanted efficiency wise but we got the job done," said redshirt freshman quarterback KJ Costello. "And against Oregon, too. Moving uptempo and really not even thinking twice as far at first down and being efficient. That's something we always got to do. Then boom, we get the first first down and we're moving. The times when we're not doing that is the situation like last week and San Diego State and those games."

Let's focus first on Arizona State, which is also the only team to have beaten Washington this season. Against the Sun Devils Stanford didn't have a dramatic shift from its traditional order of business: The Cardinal ran the ball on 16 of 25 first-down plays and completed 5-of-9 passes for 24 yards.

Stanford passed on three of its first four first-down plays: Completions to Dalton Schultz (six yards) Donald Stewart (nine yards) and Trent Irwin (nine yards) created advantageous situations on second down.

So, it's not that Stanford altered their identity for the entire game against the Sun Devils, but they changed up their tendency early in the game and it helped build the offense's momentum.

Stanford attempted more first-down passes against Oregon, but unlike against Arizona State most of the attempts came in the second half. The Cardinal ran on eight of their first 10 first-down plays, and the only completion was the trick play of Jay Tyler throwing to Ryan Burns. But the offensive line and Love were making that approach work against the Ducks.

Stanford finished 6-of-10 passing on first-down plays in the 49-7 win.

The games against Arizona State and Oregon are two of the offenses better performances and against better defenses than fielded by UCLA, Rice or Oregon State.

If Stanford can't create positive plays on first down against the Huskies then it becomes a Mount Everest-sized challenge to move the ball on the stingiest defense in the country. It will require a combination of improved offensive line play -- a tough task without freshman star left tackle Walker Little -- and finding simple, fast ways to create momentum through the passing game.