How UW Secondary Was Remade on the Fly to Beat the Trojans

When Kalen DeBoer's University of Washington football coaching staff took over, the first message relayed to their inherited players was everyone needed to get into optimum shape — because they weren't.

From there, he and his staff installed the mantra that everyone focus on the immediate task at hand, a simple ask but not always accomplished elsewhere. Forget what happened before or don't think about the future. In other words, scrub the 4-8 season in 2021 from their memories.

And, now 22 games into the DeBoer regime, after facing USC in Los Angeles, these coaches have revealed yet another chapter of their playbook for success: Always keep the other side guessing.

When Saturday's high-profile, nationally televised game began, the UW coaching staff unveiled a starting secondary that went through 60 percent positional change. Three of the five guys were new or reinvented. Radical offensive moves have been part of DeBoer's approach, yet this was the first real defensive tinkering on the fly.

With the trio of secondary personnel moves, the Huskies went out and beat equally high-powered USC 52-42, unafraid to do something different to get things done.

On the other hand, the Trojans stood pat with their defensive personnel, did what they always do and paid dearly for it — not only in the stat and win columns, but defensive coordinator Alex Grinch abruptly was fired because he never could adapt to and curtail what other people were did to his unit.

DeBoer and his defensive coaches simply decided they had to move guys around in order to win this showdown at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

Chuck Morrell, UW co-defensive coordinator and safeties coach, signed off on junior Mishael Powell moving from nickelback to free safety, junior Jabbar Muhammad from cornerback to nickelback and junior-college transfer Thaddeus Dixon starting his first Husky game at cornerback. Powell became Morrell's fifth different starting free safety this season.

Only senior strong safety Dominique Hampton and sophomore cornerback Elijah Jackson retained their same game-opening roles that they've held for nine consecutive games now.

"Necessity, for sure," Morrell said, explaining the job-swapping. "I told some of those guys, [Powell] and Jabbar, I really appreciate veteran guys like that when you get in certain situations and you just go into them on Monday, game plan day, and Tuesday, and say this is what we need for the week."

With reigning Heisman Trophy winner Caleb Williams almost always delivering the football with high-level success, the Trojans had showed a knack for repeatedly getting their wide receivers in the open field with a lot of separation from their defenders. While the Huskies weren't going to shut all of that down, they needed to limit the damage as best as they could.

The solution was to move around veteran players skilled at playing any position in the secondary rather than let the next man up, usually a younger player, get torched at corner or safety, which is what happened to the Huskies in 2022.

"[Powell] switching positions and Jabbar moving positions for the week was absolutely imperative with what we felt would give us our best chance to come out with a win," Morrell said. "Those guys, they put in so much time last week because there was a lot of new things they had to learn to go out and be successful."

Their performance in Southern California wasn't perfect by any means, with Jackson and backup safety Vince Nunley giving up end-zone touchdown passes, and Powell rushing up an impromptu flea-flicker or possibly a busted play and having a ball sail over everyone to a wide-open receiver.

Yet their collective secondary efforts enabled DeBoer's team to hang in there and walk away with a 10-point win in an entertaining, high-scoring affair, which was all anyone wanted.

Hampton, Dixon and Powell finished as the UW's top three tacklers with 10, 6 and 5, respectively. Jackson had the Huskies' only pass break-up. Muhammad was flagged for a pair of pass-interference calls, but nothing went over the top on him.

It was a gutsy move to redo the secondary in a week's time for one of the biggest games on the schedule, but it's what DeBoer's staff does to be successful, and no doubt this surprised USC some.

"They still made some mistakes, there's no doubt about it," Morrell said. "But at the same time, I look at that and that's on me. I'm asking guys to play new positions. I'm really proud of them for them being able to go out there and pull that off."

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