Note: This is a guest post from Alex Katson, spreadsheet extraordinaire, Washington partisan, and general man about town.
The date is Jan. 1, 1992. Washington, 11-0, is undefeated for the first time since 1916, led by legendary head coach Don James. The Huskies have traveled to Los Angeles for the Rose Bowl against No. 4 Michigan, led by Heisman winner Desmond Howard. The Huskies are piloted by sophomore quarterback Billy Joe Hobert and defensive end Steve Emtman, the latter of whom was the first overall pick in the 1992 NFL Draft.
On the morning of Jan. 2, the front page of the Seattle Times reads Relentless Washington Rush Rattles Michigan Quarterback. The Huskies rolled to a 34-14 win and are ranked No. 1 in the final Coaches Poll, giving them a split national championship with AP polesitter Miami (FL). It’s their first national championship in 31 years, when the 1960 Dawgs upset seven-point favorite Minnesota in the Rose Bowl.
In Milbank, South Dakota, a town of 3,000 people, a 17-year-old wide receiver is being told he’d have to move to linebacker if he wants to play college football.
The date is Dec. 1, 2004. It turned out that the 17-year-old was a hell of a wide receiver after all, even if South Dakota couldn’t see it. Kalen DeBoer was now eight years removed from setting records in receptions, receiving yards and touchdowns at NAIA Sioux Falls, and had spent the last five seasons as the offensive coordinator for the Cougars under his college coach, Bob Young. Young was retiring, though, and Sioux Falls wanted to make the 30-year-old DeBoer his replacement head coach. He keeps Young’s defensive coordinator, a former teammate of his named Chuck Morrell.
Twelve days later, Washington announced Tyrone Willingham as the program’s 26th head coach.
The Huskies had fallen from grace since winning that national championship in 1991. Hobert was at the center of an impermissible benefits scandal that led to James’ resignation in 1993. They became a member of college football’s middle class in the following years, the highlight being a Rose Bowl win under Rick Neuheisel in 2000. Willingham wouldn’t be the man to lead them out of the darkness of a 1-10 season in 2004, going 11-37 in four seasons.
It’s July 2007. Former Division III Buena Vista football player Ryan Grubb is finishing his day job pouring concrete. He’s been working this gig while living in his sister’s laundry room in Iowa, waiting for a chance to break through in the coaching ranks after two seasons with South Dakota State. The phone rings with an offer. Sioux Falls needs an offensive line coach, and DeBoer can offer him 2,700 dollars for the five-month-long season. Grubb gladly takes it.
In 2010, fresh off back-to-back national championships, DeBoer met with Sioux Falls athletic director Willie Sanchez. He has an offer to go to Southern Illinois as its offensive coordinator, and Sanchez – a former personnel executive for the Dodgers – tells DeBoer he’s fired if he doesn’t take the job.
So, the 67-3 coach packed up his things, including three national championship trophies, and left his alma mater in what would later prove the first big step of his journey to the pinnacle of the sport.
Four seasons with the Salukis were enough to earn DeBoer another offer, and another step up the ladder. There was an opening at offensive coordinator at Eastern Michigan under first-year head coach and Washington native Chris Creighton, and he wanted DeBoer. A former safety at Ottawa (Kansas) under Creighton named Ron McKeefery left his job with the Bengals to join the staff as well. DeBoer convinced Creighton to hire his old buddy Grubb as EMU’s offensive line coach, and the three split a two-bedroom apartment in married student housing. They were not married, but no one seemed to mind.
Two bedrooms for three people was sufficient, because DeBoer was sleeping on the floor.
The three of them helped Eastern Michigan to a bowl game, its first in 29 years, and then DeBoer and Grubb left for Fresno State. DeBoer took a one-year detour to Indiana as offensive coordinator before becoming head coach at Fresno State in 2020. He elevated Grubb to offensive coordinator, reunited with Morrell, previously the head coach at Montana Tech, as safeties coach, and brought McKeefery on as assistant director for sports performance.
The date is November 6, 2021. Jimmy Lake is in his second season as head coach on Montlake after taking over for the retired Chris Petersen, who led Washington to a College Football Playoff berth in 2016. Lake’s tenure is not going as well. The Huskies lost to Montana in their season opener, setting a terrible tone that put them at 4-4 entering a rivalry game with Oregon. In the first half, Lake hits and then shoves linebacker Ruperake Fuavai. Washington suspends Lake the following Monday and fires him with cause six days later.
In Fresno, the 7-2 and 23rd-ranked Bulldogs have been shellacked by Boise State, 40-14. It’s hardly a blip in the season for Fresno State, which has already beaten UCLA and taken Oregon to the brink thanks to DeBoer and quarterback Jake Haener, a former Washington starter.
In Bloomington, Ind., Michael Penix Jr. watches his Hoosiers get stomped by Michigan, 29-7. He’s already been ruled out for the season with a dislocated shoulder, his fourth season-ending injury in as many years at Indiana. In the weeks that follow, Penix will wait for his roommate to leave for the day, then he’ll lay on the floor and cry. He’s thinking of retiring from football.
Fifteen days after Lake is officially fired, Washington announces DeBoer as their next head coach. Creighton, the Roosevelt High alum, leaves him an excited voicemail about what a good fit it is. Grubb, Morrell and McKeefery all sign on to join the staff. They convince a talented young receiver named Rome Odunze to take his name out of the transfer portal. DeBoer wants Haener, who has one year of eligibility left and grew up a Husky fan, to come back to Montlake.
There’s just one problem: Haener doesn’t have his degree yet. Fresno State is a semester school; UW runs on quarters. Haener can’t get the credits he needs to hit the portal a second time until the summer. Fresno State re-hired Jeff Tedford, and Haener decided it was a better idea to stay in Fresno with his old coach than rush his degree.
So, DeBoer called Penix, the only other quarterback in the portal familiar with his offensive system.
Edefuan Ulofoshio walked on to Washington in 2018. He stayed when Petersen retired and when Lake was fired, sticking it out through a season-ending injury in 2021 and another injury that took eight games from him in 2022. He was a Butkus Award finalist and team captain this season.
Jack Westover did not play high school football until his senior season at local Mt. Si High School. Two games in, he broke his collarbone, leaving him with hardly any tape to show to recruiters. He walked on in 2018 and stuck it out, just like Ulofoshio. This season, he’s been on the receiving end of countless clutch plays to keep Washington’s unbeaten streak alive.
Nickelback Meesh Powell is from Seattle. He played his high school ball four miles away from Husky Stadium. Eschewing offers from Ivy League schools, Powell decided to stay home and walked on in 2019. He’s seen all three coaches, just like Ulofoshio and Westover. Without his pick-six against Arizona State, one of the seminal moments of the season, Washington would not be where it now is.
Safety Asa Turner’s jersey does not read Turner. It simply reads “Asa”. Asa has not had contact with his father, the Turner in this equation, since middle school. DeBoer let him change his nameplate to his first name while he decided on a new legal last name. Former UW safety Alex Cook’s son, born in December 2022, is also Asa. Big Asa is his godfather.
After the 2022 season, the Huskies had at least seven starters who could have declared for the NFL Draft without anyone batting an eye. Penix repaid DeBoer’s trust in him by committing to come back. Odunze and Jalen McMillan returned, the former touting UW’s goal of winning a national championship. Left tackle Troy Fautanu did the same despite late draft buzz that could have netted him a heft paycheck. Pass rushers Bralen Trice and Zion Tupuola-Fetui made a joint announcement, shocking the draft world – which had placed both players in the first-round conversation at one point or another. Ulofoshio was more than happy to go around one more time, having finally seen his hard work pay off.
Linebacker Carson Bruener has endeared himself to Washington fans with a weekly thumping of an opposing returner, but as the season has gone on, he’s earned more of a role on defense. Against Texas, the redshirt junior forced a fumble on the 32nd anniversary of his dad, Mark Bruener, catching a touchdown in Washington’s Rose Bowl win over Michigan. You’ve certainly seen the picture.
Backup quarterback Dylan Morris was dealt one of the worst hands in college football history, tasked with helming the squad through a disastrous coaching tenure. That coach was fired, the new coach brought his own guy, and Morris…stayed. A local product whose dream was always to play for the Huskies, the former four-star stuck around to finish his degree. Even after entering the portal in December, DeBoer has let him remain with the team through its playoff run. He’ll suit up one last time for the Huskies before heading off to James Madison. You won’t find a person in or around the program with a bad thing to say about him.
At the time, the prevailing question was pretty simple. Why?
Obviously, a national championship is every Power Five team’s goal (to varying levels of seriousness). But to outsiders, Washington didn’t seem particularly well-poised to crack the field. USC had the reigning Heisman winner and Meet at Midfield Most Wanted list headliner Caleb Williams returning. Oregon and Utah looked stout. Oregon State was clearly on the rise. Washington had to play all four of them in a six-game stretch, and the prevailing wisdom was that the Pac-12 would cannibalize itself, again.
It didn’t matter. Washington was met with doubt at every turn, and was more than happy to embrace that. The Huskies won blowouts and barnburners. They toppled Oregon by three in one of the best games of the season, rolled over three top 25 teams in three weeks, took a short rest, and knocked off a pair of top five teams – adding Pac-12 and Sugar Bowl trophies to their stockpile in the process. They bewildered talking heads, baffled advanced statistics, and emerged from the Pac-12 final season without a blemish.
Sure, we could preview Monday’s matchup with Michigan. I could write 1,000 more words about how Penix is a good enough quarterback to overcome any defense, even one as sound as Michigan’s. Washington does not have a reliable running back behind Dillon Johnson, who will play but may be limited due to a foot injury he reaggravated against Texas. The Wolverines’ defensive line has been dominant all season, but will have to outfight the Joe Moore Award winners on the offensive line for Washington. Rome Odunze vs. Will Johnson will be one of the premier matchups of the last few seasons. Michigan probably doesn’t have a linebacker who can guard Westover.
Defensively, Washington is soft on the interior, which profiles poorly against a Michigan team addicted to running the ball so much that Blake Corum will need a double knee replacement by the time he hits the NFL. Texas ran the ball all over the Huskies before going away from it for plot reasons in the semifinal. Michigan won’t do that (probably), which could force Washington to play Bruener more at linebacker or bring in third edge rusher Sekai Asoau-Afoa as a stouter run defender.
In that same breath, Trice and Tupuola-Fetui can beat any tackle tandem in the country and Michigan’s are weak, which should line up for a second consecutive big game from the former. Maybe the Seattle Times could even run that Relentless Washington Rush Rattles Michigan Quarterback headline back! Behind them, Jabbar Muhammad has played his best football in big moments, and the rest of the secondary follows his lead.
But it won’t really matter, at least not in the ways it’s supposed to. It’s all a moot point. Washington is a Real College Football Team. It might be the last one, at least at the top of the sport.
The Huskies have built loyalty that is nigh extinct in the modern era of college football. It can be traced all the way back to those NAIA champion Sioux Falls teams. Grubb turned down the offensive coordinator job at fucking Alabama when Washington matched the salary offer because he believed in what DeBoer was doing. Wide receivers coach JaMarcus Shepard has been rumored to take a litany of jobs elsewhere, most recently at Notre Dame, but has always stuck around. Do you want the why all those players passed up the NFL Draft last season? The answer isn’t hard to find if you’re just willing to look.
That culture is not manufactured, either. DeBoer is as genuine as it gets in the coaching world, a humble Midwesterner stereotype cranked to 11. His first act as head coach was to welcome former players back into the building, fostering relationships so strong that the 1991 national championship team is heading to Houston to cheer on a team they’ve referred to as their little brothers. A chunk of DeBoer’s Sioux Falls players will be there too, just like they were there for the Sugar Bowl – touting signs emblazoned with the faces of their old head coach next to Grubb and Morrell.
Washington has not built this team like an all-star squad, either. Penix was a thrifted transfer, not one taken off the rack. Johnson wasn’t seen as a bona fide stud. Odunze, McMillan, Fautanu, right tackle Roger Rosengarten, Trice, Tupuola-Fetui and Ulofoshio, all developed solely on Montlake. Local product walk-ons like Westover, Ulofoshio and Powell have become starters, something that feels like it hasn’t happened at another power program in eons.
There are exceptions, of course. Muhammad was a four-year starter at Oklahoma State, for example. But, Washington is pretty damn close to being farm-to-table, at least relative to the competition.
Beyond all of this, the Huskies are just fucking cool. Every story about the program is a fun one. Penix is the ultimate comeback story, the only sixth-year senior quarterback in the country who nobody is begging to graduate and get a job. He’s freestyling on the sidelines of a rivalry game and tearing up when the alma mater plays and shouting out his boys in jail back home in Tampa in postgame interviews. Players are talking shit to men in their 40s in front of their children after games. Kicker Grady Gross got put on scholarship minutes after hitting a game-winner in the Apple Cup.
College football is not supposed to be a perfect product. The chaos and disorder are baked in, because these are young men more likely to be selling insurance than playing in the NFL five years from now. TV contracts, conference realignment and a decade of being beaten over the head with the same five teams for a decade has made us forget that. Washington is a welcome reminder.
As an invested observer, it’s maddening. I’ve lost decades from my lifespan watching this goofy-ass team all season.
But as a neutral observer, consider your rooting interests on Monday. Would you rather take the fond memory of what this sport used to be – the team with storylines that feel like they belong in college and not the NFL, with a staff that cares about mentoring young men and not about where their next check is coming from?
Or would you rather take the manifestation of the eldritch horror the sport is becoming, the team thrice eulogizing a man eating a well-done steak in a hotel 10 minutes away to try to convince you they have the culture abundantly and clearly present on the other sideline?
Washington cannot be immune to these changes forever. Grubb publicly and deservedly wants to be a head coach, although the market seems to have opened and closed without him departing for at least one more season. Penix, Johnson, Odunze, Westover, Fautanu, Trice, Tupuola-Fetui, Ulofoshio, Muhammad and Asa will play their final games as Huskies on Monday, and Washington will have to turn to the portal (and an insanely strong NIL collective) to replace them. They’re joining the fucking Big Ten, for Christ’s sake.
That’s a problem for 2024. In 2023, the Huskies are uncontaminated. Every other program in the soon-to-be Power Four has already moved on to fielding an NFL team with coaches who will be at their fifth school in five years by 2027. A Washington win on Monday would be the last, gasping breath of God’s intended college football.
Washington has been underrated and overlooked all season. They were underdogs in Corvallis, in Las Vegas for the Pac-12 Championship despite having already beaten Oregon and in New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl. They’ll be underdogs again on Monday.
Do you think the man who set school records as a wide receiver after being told to move to linebacker – who slept on the concrete floor to leave beds for his friends, while winning at Eastern Michigan – gives a shit? What about the architect of college football’s best offense, who was pouring concrete and living in a laundry room in Iowa? Or the quarterback who thought he would have to retire from the sport before he got the call to come to Seattle, after making Indiana an honest-to-God football team?
Of course not. Their concern is elsewhere. As DeBoer would say: Winners win, because that’s what winners do. Go fucking Dawgs, baby.