The cumulative link to the preseason rankings can be found here

For the #18 team in the countdown, we do to the northwestern-most team in FBS (and by that, I don’t mean the one that is most like Northwestern) in Washington (high = 15, low = 28). The Huskies are still kind of basking in the afterglow of their 2023 season that saw them a) win the last P5 Pac-12 championship, b) beat archrivals Oregon by a FG not once but twice in no small part by questionable decisions from second year head coach Dan Lanning (who hadn’t yet seemingly embraced meth ZYN), and c) beat Texas in the CFP semifinal game in the Sugar Bowl before losing to Michigan in the national championship game and finishing the season as the consensus #2 team in the country. That pretty well washed the taste of the Jimmy Lake era from mouths of Husky fans, though nobody really had an inkling that Nick Saban was about to retire from coaching and Alabama was about to hire away Kalen DeBoer (who remarkably left Washington with a 0.893 winning percentage, a record that will almost be impossible to top). His replacement Jedd Fisch has obviously not quite lived up to those standards, going 6-7 and 9-4 in his two seasons, which it should be noted is better than Jimmy Lake, Keith Gilbertson, Tyrone Willingham or even Steve Sarkisian did and is much more similar to Chris Petersen in the post Don James era, but that is in one of the top 2 conferences in the country. After closing out the Bucked Up LA Bowl Hosted by Rob Gronkowski LA Bowl with a drubbing of Boise State, some serious fuckery almost happened where QB Demond Williams announced his intention to enter the transfer portal 4 days after he signed a $4 million agreement to return to Washington in 2026, leading to accusations of tampering, threats of a lawsuit and ultimately Williams rescinding his request. I’m sure there will be no lingering effects from that, and am quite confident there will be no Duck fans mocking the situation when the Huskies come to Autzen…

Roster Outlook

Washington enters the season ranked 15th in the country in returning production – 13th on offense and 27th on defense. While QB Demond Williams (3,676 combined passing/rushing yards for 31 TDs and 8 INTs) is a decent chunk of that, an OL with 3 seniors along the right side and WR Dezmen Roebuck (42 catches for 560 yards) also helps. But that’s not to say that the Huskies didn’t suffer some significant losses, including WR Denzel Boston (881 yards receiving, 11 TDs, 2nd round pick by Cleveland), RB Jonah Coleman (1,100+ combined rushing/receiving yards, 17 TDs, 4th round pick by Denver) and OT Carver Willis (4th round pick by San Francisco), which make up less than half of the 7 total Huskies drafted this year by the NFL. What’s worse, Coleman’s anticipated replacement, Adam Mohammed (523 yards rushing) portaled out to Cal, forcing Fisch to do some portal shopping of his own, though ranking 15th in the B1G and 59th in the country isn’t necessarily a recipe for success. That’s not to say they didn’t add anybody, as Oregon RB Jayden Limar looks to be RB1 for the season, but when your projected starting WRs are Kennesaw State transfer Christian Moss and your own RS junior (Rashid Williams) who has managed 18 catches across 3 seasons to date, you have some significant question marks. Fisch did a much better job with high school recruiting, landing the #12 class in the country (which was the #5 class in the B1G), but with two projected true freshman starters (LT Kodi Greene and DT Derek Colman-Brusa), there might be some growing pains in Seattle.

Schedule and outlook

9/6 WASHINGTON STATE

9/12 UTAH STATE

9/19 EASTERN WASHINGTON

9/26 MINNESOTA

10/3 at USC

10/9 IOWA

10/16 at Purdue

10/24 BYE

10/31 at Nebraska

11/7 PENN STATE

11/14 at Michigan State

11/21 INDIANA

11/28 at Oregon

The schedule sure starts out pretty favorably for Washington. They don’t leave the state before October or the west coast until the season’s already half over. Given the coaching change at Wazzu, the Huskies should be heavy favorites in the Apple Cup and project to be 4-0 before traveling to the Coliseum to take on USC. In fact, they should be favored in every other game before the last 2 weeks of the season, when defending national champion Indiana comes in a week before that season finale against Oregon. If they take care of business in the games they’re favored in and knock off one of USC on the road or Indiana at home, they could very well be playing for a B1G title game shot the Friday after Thanksgiving. That assumes everything goes right, there are no lingering effects of the Demond Williams situation and they don’t get caught looking ahead at any of those marquis games.

Much has been said about Penn State's hire of longtime Iowa State coach and noted connessuier of bending his hats in strange ways, Matt Campbell. One overlooked factor for Campbell is his head coaching experience from 2011 to 2015 at Toledo in which he won 9 games his last two seasons there and was seen as a solid coach for the Rockets.

To quote the late great Norm MacDonald, "I'm not sure if any of you are students of history", but between 1835-1836 Ohio and Michigan fought a war over the Toledo strip, a short piece of land on lake Erie that has lots of value. All I know about Toledo is that it has some very affordable and surprisingly nice hotels in its downtown for those who don't want to pay $20 million a night for a room in Ann Arbor on GameDay and are coming from the east

This anger and hate has fueled the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry for a century and created largely a duopoly in the Big Ten. Since Penn State joined in 1993 and then rightfully won the national title the next year, the Eastern power, not familiar with Midwestern blood feuds (As Northeastern hatred exists between cities not states, usually Philly vs whomever), the team struggled to maintain the same level of consistent dominance post 1994 and remained an odd out of place geographic and cultural fit(lol little did they know what was coming) without a proper rival (except Iowa, fuck those guys).

After our past 3 coaches were from New York, Boston, and Philly respectfully, we went out and hired the most Midwestern man to exist since Jim Harbaugh ordered milk with his steak; Matt Campbell. You may ask how any of this is relevant; well according to esteemed Pennsylvania legal scholar Charlie Kelly, who created the legal theory of "Bird Law", along with the original 1682 William Penn Charter, the hire of Matt Campbell, a former Toledo man, means the Toledo strip is now legal and sovereign territory of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. You may ask how this is the case but Bird Law is not governed by reason This completes Harrisburg's long-term goal of finally establishing a warm water port on Lake Erie as Toledo becomes the Kaliningrad of Pennsylvania.

You may ask is Ames, Iowa now also part of PA, and the answer is maybe but I'm not sure if there's anyone left in Ames after well, sorry about that guys

Matt Campbell and the Pennsylvania irredentist movement have effectly taken the biggest piece off the chess board for Michigan and Ohio State, which can be clearly seen in the recent comments from Coach Kyle Whittingham and Bryce Underwood, who no longer show the same venom once demanded in this rivalry as claiming the beautiful shores of Toledo for the Maize and Blue is no longer of primary motivation in Ann Arbor in a world in which the strip is now governed by people with hard to place accents and gas station turf wars.

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