How Long Will It Take UW Football to Bounce Back? Others Say Not Long
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It used to be that a college football coach needed three seasons to turn things around at a new school. Thirty-six months to bring in his own players and weed out the ones who didn't fit his plan.
That was the widely accepted blueprint, especially for the University of Washington. Three years to fix everything. Three years to make the donors happy again.
Jim Owens went 3-6-1 and 3-7 before putting the Huskies in the 1960 Rose Bowl against Wisconsin.
Don James went 6-5 and 5-6 before advancing the UW to the 1978 Rose Bowl against Michigan.
Even the nearly unbeatable Chris Petersen at Boise State went a more mundane 8-6 and 7-6 before putting the UW in the 2016 College Football Playoff against Alabama.
Now comes Kalen DeBoer, trying to pick up the pieces of a 4-8 lost season that sent Jimmy Lake into unemployment after just 13 games in charge of the Huskies over two seasons and who would not get that third season.
CBSSports.com thinks the new UW leader might be ahead of the curve. The site includes DeBoer's Huskies among 10 programs it projects will make a turnaround this fall after tough times and land in a bowl game.
Broken into tiers, these bounce-back teams are USC (4-8), Texas (5-7) and Florida State (5-7); Nebraska (3-9), Troy (5-7) and the Huskies; Northwestern (3-9), TCU (5-7) and Florida Atlantic (5-7); and Akron (2-10).
An immediate question about the CBSSports list is why do we care about Troy, Florida Atlantic and Akron? They're barely mid-major. They're not in college football's general conversation.
Power 5 teams such as LSU (6-7) Stanford (3-9), Florida (6-7), North Carolina (6-7), Indiana (2-10) and Virginia Tech (6-7) are much more recognizable as recent winning programs but coming off real downers in 2021.
As for the Huskies, DeBoer inherited plenty of talent recruited by both Petersen and Lake that gives him something to build with. He has a schedule not too taxing.
Twenty twenty-two turnaround?
Why not?
Beats waiting three years.
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