Jeremy Paul Baker

There you are, staring at the glow of a big screen TV on a Friday night, watching the Dawgs perform under the lights of Ross-Ade Stadium in West Lafayette, Indiana. West Lafayette. You watch until the end. Washington 38, Purdue 26. A much-needed win. Elijah Brown slinging it around, surviving the turnovers, making plays to stave off a season that was in freefall. But throughout the broadcast, you can't shake the thought: "What on God’s green earth are we doing here? Why are we playing Purdue on a Friday night in a conference game?" It's an unsettling, alien twitch in the back of the ol' noggin. We don’t belong here. This isn’t about Jedd Fisch’s sideways passing charts or whether Washington can hang physically. The Huskies have the resources to compete. And they showed that last night, finally. No more excuses! No, it’s not about talent. It’s about the soul of the thing. How in the world are we playing Purdue in a conference game? There is no shared blood here. No lingering grudges born of rainy November afternoons in Pacific Northwest college towns. No memory of a despised white-haired coach in a sweater, stalking the opposite sideline, his recent insult calling your team "mercenaries" inciting the wrath of the Husky Stadium crowd. No middle-aged father of four sitting in the stands remembering a bitter pick 6 interception from 1994 that marked the end of one era and started another. No 70-year old from Cottage Grove, OR, telling his grandkids about the time in 1985 when a Seattle sportswriter called the Oregon State Beavers "The Barney Fife of College Football" and then, by God, the Beavs went into Husky Stadium and stunned the college football world! No, Purdue is just… a school in Indiana with a drum and a train. They belong to Iowa and Indiana and Illinois and Michigan. The Huskies should have been playing the Cal Bears last night. We should have been arguing about Adam Mohammed's transfer and how long is coach Tosh Lupoi going to survive in Berkeley before he returns to the warm, welcoming bosom of Sark's staff or else finds himself working some kiosk in a suburban mall selling cell phones. And then we should be spending all next week mapping out the drive down I-5 to Corvallis for a Saturday afternoon game against chippy Oregon State. That cool little freeway moment of camaraderie when you glance over at the car next to you, and some purple-and-gold jacket or adhesive in the back window signals the kinship, and maybe you honk and they honk back with the thumbs up. That was our life. That was our neighborhood. You knew the houses on your block, and you knew the families who lived in them, so to speak. Instead, the realities of college football have forced UW to mortgage their identity to become a far-flung western outpost in a television cartel, flying volleyball teams and tennis squads three time zones away to play Rutgers and Maryland like some traveling corporate circus. And why? For the money, they told us. For survival. The almighty television payout. But if you zoom out and look at fiscal realities, is this really sustainable? When you look at what’s happening right now with global bond markets and the "cost of capital." Borrowing money used to be almost free. It isn’t anymore. The real cost to build giant facilities and service old stadium debt has exploded. The Fed will probably raise rates again later this month. Can AI eventually make raising interest rates moot? (A conversation for another time). But Ohio State, Texas, and Alabama? Even they aren't immune to the current pressures of the bottom line. Sark's Texas Longhorns were $23 million in the red last year despite massive revenues. Ohio State and Alabama basically broke even. But for everybody else trying to keep up—including west coast athletic departments chartering red-eyes to Piscataway—the bill always comes due. When austerity finally crashes down upon our reality, teams like the Washington Huskies will be left standing in the cornfields, thousands of miles from home, wondering why we traded away our history just to play Purdue on a Friday night.