Hard to believe that USC put this out on social media in 2014

I'm not just saying this because the Seahawks won, but I sure like Mike Macdonald. Understated, humble and tough. If I were a player I would run through a brick wall for that guy.

Every time Jedd Fisch opens his mouth he just seems to make things worse. Remember August training camp in 2024? He handed out t-shirts to his players that showed the Top 25 on the back and a manufactured protest: “Where’s Washington?” Disrespect was the whole sales pitch. Now in 2026, sitting at 1-3 in conference and 4-3 overall, and with the hustle wearing thin with many fans, Jedd offered a practiced shrug when asked about being ranked 17th coming into the season: “We didn’t rank us 17th," he said. "While I appreciated the rankings, I think that it comes down to … how do we handle each week? We had a couple of games that didn’t go our way, that certainly could have and they just didn’t. Instead of sitting here and you’re talking about a 6-1 season, you’re looking at a 4-3 record.” See the con? When he’s hunting buy-in, polls are holy gospel stamped on your back. When actual games expose your team, it’s just tough luck and bad bounces.

Camp Randall under the cold gray lights, and the students spilled over the brick to storm the field to celebrate the slaying of mighty Southern Cal. Someone should tell those misguided youth that nobody slayed a giant. They merely popped a balloon. Minus-17 yards rushing. Read that again: negative seventeen yards for USC. A number that makes this year's Washington Huskies run game look like 1995 Nebraska. But Lincoln Riley’s minted millionaires managed to lose -17 yards on the ground last night against Wisconsin. Meanwhile, the porous Trojan defense surrendered 24 points to the leather-helmeted era Badger offense. Yikes. Over on X, talking heads were weeping into their lattes about USC’s “damaged playoff hopes.” Good lord. Jen Cohen's USC team was never going to the playoffs. Not this year. Not in the near future. That 6-1 start was a carnival grift. Smoke, mirrors, and cheap parlor tricks. They built that record feasting on cupcakes, surviving Rutgers by seven, and riding sheer blind luck when the panicked blunders of Demond Williams handed them a four-point escape against Washington. Strip away the cardinal-and-gold lacquer and what’s left of this team? Soft in the trenches. Five sacks surrendered and bullied off the ball by a middling Badger front. Finesse coaching. Lincoln Riley still diagrams plays for seventy-degree sunshine, oddly oblivious to Midwest trench warfare. (He once coached at Oklahoma, after all). Horrible tackling. Defensive backs lunging awkwardly while ballcarriers churn for five extra yards. No identity: When the screen pass strategy dies, the offense curls up into the fetal position. Next Saturday, powerhouse Ohio State rolls into Los Angeles. To paraphrase an old inside joke from Hardcore Husky, "What is iDawg going to say when Ohio State hangs fifty on USC next Saturday night at the LA Coliseum?"

Alabama just got flagged for having a defensive back line up in the neutral zone, giving Texas A&M a first down. In decades of watching football I've never seen that happen before.

I'm not sure Washington will be able to manage more than 225 yards of offense against that Indiana defense on Nov 21.

I remember the rain drumming against the windowpanes one stormy night back in 2008, when I was having a two-hour phone conversation with former UW assistant coach Dick Baird. When the topic of the 1996 season came up, I sat listening to Baird pour his heart through the receiver. I should add that the retired Baird by that time was a co-host of the KJR show, The Husky Honks. The '96 Dawgs were led by Jim Lambright and had strong talent. Brock Huard was the heralded lefty QB, Jason Chorak was terrorizing edges, and middle linebacker Ink Aleaga was headhunting from the second level. But according to Baird, a civil war was brewing behind closed doors about the offense. Baird and other assistants were begging and pleading with Lambo to start a bruising newcomer named Corey Dillon at tailback. Lambright, though, was enamored with Rashaan Shehee—who was a fine back who went on to play two seasons with the Kansas City Chiefs. But Dillon was a force of nature waiting to be unleashed. It was clear as day to Baird. But Lambo dug in his heels, letting loyalty (or something) blur his vision until mid-October, when it became too painfully obvious. Notre Dame crushed the Huskies 54-20, and racked up 650 yards of offense, which obviously wasn't Shehee's fault. But coming off the bench, Dillon was the lone bright spot, rushing 18 times for 87 yards and two touchdowns. The truth simply became too obvious to bench. Dillon finally took over the next week and sent the Huskies on a 6-game winning streak. First start against UCLA, he rushed for 145 yards and 5 TDs. The next week at Autzen, he rushed for 259 yards as the Huskies spanked the Ducks 33-14. Against San Jose State, he set a NCAA record with 222 yards rushing in the first quarter! (One of my regrets in my life is failing to ask Lambright before he passed whose decision it was to rest Dillon the rest of the game. He had a shot to beat Hugh McElhenny's single game rushing record of 296 yards from 1950). Anyway, Washington finished the season 9-3 when it can be argued, and Baird knew in his bones, that the Dawgs were an 11-1 powerhouse robbed by hesitation. Thirty seasons later, the ghost of stubbornness has reared its ugly head once again. Here we sit in October of 2026, and current Huskies coach Jedd Fisch has possibly painted himself into a corner of his own making. You can argue that he has already sold out this season by clinging so long to Demond Williams while Elijah Brown watched helplessly from the sideline. Instead of possibly sitting pretty right now at 6-1, Washington heads to Lincoln, Nebraska next week with a 4-3 record, 1-3 in Big 10 play. But looking at the win over Purdue, the way in which the entire team seemed to receive a shot of vitamin B12 when Brown played can't be denied. With five games left on the schedule, however, Jedd Fisch still has plenty of runway to inflict more damage. The game tape of Demond Williams doesn't lie, and neither does the scoreboard. Will Fisch cling to his vanity project, selling out the locker room’s potential to his own egotism? Or will he swallow his pride, finally concede like Lambo did that the experiment failed, and permanently hand over the offense to Brown before hopes for a bowl game vanish for good? We shall soon see.

13 years ago today, Don James passed away at age 80 from pancreatic cancer.

In the 2025 Washington vs Michigan game, the score was tied 7-7 in the late third quarter, until back-to-back Demond Williams interceptions gave the game away. Both times it was like he just threw the ball right into the arms of Wolverine defenders. Michigan went on to prevail 24-7. Since then, I had quietly nourished the suspicion that Williams may have sabotaged that game on purpose. Tonight I went back and watched the second half of that game without emotion, including those interceptions, and I'm now 100% convinced he didn't do it on purpose. He's just an undersized quarterback who locks onto receivers.

I realize what I'm saying in this tweet is fantasy land stuff. But if Demond Williams were to consent to becoming a running back or H-back for the Nebraska game in two weeks, it would not only help the team but would also immediately triage his destroyed reputation and invigorate the fans to root for him again.

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.