Inside The Huskies

Brace Yourselves For Huskies and Mariners Games on Friday

The sporting events now overlap and Seattle traffic should be a real mess.
Dan Raley|
Jedd Fisch might find Friday to be a challenge with the Huskies and Mariners playing in town in national games.
Jedd Fisch might find Friday to be a challenge with the Huskies and Mariners playing in town in national games. | Dave Sizer photo

Take your pick, it's going to be Friday Night Tight or Friday Night Fright for the Seattle sporting landscape.

At one end of town, the Seattle Mariners will be playing for their postseason baseball lives at T-Mobile Park against the Detroit Tigers on Friday afternoon in the deciding Game 5 of the American League Division Series at T-Mobile Park. First pitch initially was 1:40 p.m. -- and now it's been rescheduled to 5:08.

And no sooner than that one begins, the University of Washington football team will host Rutgers 5.5 miles away in its homecoming game at Husky Stadium, with kickoff scheduled for 6 p.m. on Friday night.

Sports fans, start your engines -- and know where your short cuts are all around town.

Traffic could ugly out there, over and above the normal Friday night rush-hour horror show that unfolds.

On Monday afternoon, Husky coach Jedd Fisch anticipated this logjam of humanity and wishfully called for the Mariners to sweep and wrap up their baseball series in Detroit to keep things somewhat sane for the sports fan on Friday.

No such luck.

Seattle's baseball team lost 9-3 in Detroit on Wednesday to bring the series back to the Northwest.

Fisch was hoping for a 70,000-plus sellout on Friday night at his lakefront stadium, but the Mariners stand to bite into that turnout some after averaging 47,000-plus for each of their previous postseason games.

"I'm excited for a huge turnout," Fisch said in his weekly briefly to begin the week. "Every game we've played on the road since i've been here has been sold out. All the games last season. All the games this season. That's what Big Ten football is all about. It's about unbelievable crowds."

FS1 originally was scheduled to televise each of these Friday sporting events from Seattle to a national audience, but FOX will now show the baseball game.

Either way, the city is bracing itself for roughly a five-hour window of nonstop sports inside the city limits that will be shared nationally from the Emerald City.

"Love a sellout," Fisch said. "That's kind of what the expectation has become in this conference. It's pretty cool when you go all the way across the country like we did this last week or you play more local, it seems like sellouts are the thing to do."

In this case, imagine Cal Raleigh and Julio Rodriguez riding to their game in one car on Interstate 5, and laying on their horn and trying to get Demond Williams Jr. and Denzel Boston in another vehicle to move out of their way.

Traveling anywhere in the city is going to be a real test on Friday, let alone hitting fastballs and quarterbacks.

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Dan Raley
DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.

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