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Inside The Huskies

College Football's Ultimate Spoiler? UW Draws Consideration

Podcaster Josh Pate sounded the alarms after the AP Top 25 was released.
Dan Raley|
Jedd Fisch has a football team that can cause some playoff turbulence.
Jedd Fisch has a football team that can cause some playoff turbulence. | Dan Rale

A few weeks ago, college football analysts predicted who would make the Top 25 of the preseason Associated Press poll, considered the holy grail of the assorted rankings out there, and the University of Washington was a glaring omission.

However, the gap in time only served to bring the Huskies in at No. 17 on Monday and for the experts to reconsider their opinion of Jedd Fisch's Huskies and the potential influence they wield as a spoiler lurking at the shallow end of Lake Washington.

"Dude, Washington could wreck this whole thing," noted college football voice Josh Pate proclaimed after seeing who went where in the initial AP poll for the 2026 season.

He views the Huskies as the ultimate spoiler, in fact.

Pate, a Southern-based podcaster and ESPN contributor, sounded the alarms for college football's hierarchy after considering the ultra swift Demond Williams Jr. at quarterback, a schedule that favors the Huskies and Jedd Fisch's steady building efforts in now his third year in Seattle.

"You want to talk about a hinge team, you want to talk about a wild card team, the ultimate fly in the ointment," Pate said from Nashville, Tennessee, cautioning everyone about the power the Huskies possess over postseason favorites.

"There is a world where Washington uses that to thrust itself into the playoff," he envisioned on air, dropping different scenarios. "There's another world where Washington doesn't quite make the playoff, but they're the reason you don't make the playoff."

For some of these guys with a big audience such as Pate, they're just now remembering that it was only three years ago that the Huskies advanced all the way to the College Football Playoff championship game in Houston and rearranged everyone's season except for Michigan, which won it all.

With a different coaching staff, the Huskies come off a 9-4 second season under Fisch with the potential to expand on their recent success with a much better defense, a gargantuan offenisve line that pencils out to 327 pounds per starter and, of course, Williams, possibly the fastest quarterback in Power 4 football.

They see the coach steadily building something that ultimately could beat a few blue bloods along the way in the coming months.

"Jedd Fisch," Pate concluded, "can be an ultimate chaos agent."

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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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