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OPINION: A Husky Football Season Like No Other is Coming ... In Stops and Starts

University of Washington fans should be prepared for anything because it is the pandemic that will dictate who plays who and when in the months ahead. Here's one abstract viewpoint.
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Season or no season?

Sunday marks two months until Washington's college football opener at home against Michigan.

Sixty-two days to be exact.

Do you honestly think you'll be squeezing in among 72,000 people on Sept. 5 at Husky Stadium and screaming your lungs out?

How about 10,000?

OK, TV cameras only?

Anything at all?

As the novel coronavirus spikes in scary numbers across the country — with no consensus among the nation's 320 million citizens on wearing masks or adhering to social-distancing edicts — here's what's going to happen.

This is the opinion of one man, someone who considers himself an artful historian, apolitical, generally hopeful. 

These are very weird times. 

Forget Michigan.

That game is as good as canceled.

There's no way the Wolverines are going to travel 2,300 miles in the middle of a pandemic that still hasn't reached halftime.

Sacramento State and Utah State, too.

Wipe out the entire non-conference schedule. 

It will take at least two more months for people, at all levels, to finally take the virus seriously and flatten the new infections and the death rates.

Three months will be needed before college football gets the go-ahead to play.

On Friday night, October 23, the Huskies will open the season at home against Arizona.

It's not Michigan, but it's something. 

The UW will cautiously play a six-game schedule.

The Huskies also will host Stanford and Colorado and travel to California, USC and WSU. 

To empty stadiums.

Wait a minute, the Trojans have to cancel.

Southern California is still a virus hotbed.

No one will care who starts at quarterback for the purple and gold.

As long as someone, anyone, is out there taking snaps, UW fans will be thrilled.

Entries for the Pac-12 championship will be decided by coin flips.

The Huskies call tails. 

It's heads. 

Oregon State and Arizona play for the conference title.

The Beavers win.

Bowl games will be cut in half from 40 to 20. 

The smug SEC, as always, will lobby for two, maybe three teams, to fill out the College Football Playoff final bracket.

The Huskies end up in the Sun Bowl — against Michigan.

UW fans will acknowledge their good fortune in having a half-dozen games, including a postseason match-up, carried out in 2020.

They'll loudly bemoan the fact that Oregon wasn't on the schedule for just the second time in 75 years (2001 was the other miss).

They'll grumble until hearing that the Huskies and Ducks will meet on Saturday, May 1, in Eugene.

In a glorified spring game.

One that will count in the record books.

Yes, weird times indeed.

Take what you can get. 

Follow Dan Raley of Husky Maven on Twitter: @DanRaley1 and @HuskyMaven

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