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Inside The Huskies

Huskies Draw Pair of Friday Night Games -- On Consecutive Weeks

The UW will host Iowa and travel to Purdue to play on week nights.
Dan Raley|
The Purple team gathers around quarterback Demond Williams Jr. as he calls the play.
The Purple team gathers around quarterback Demond Williams Jr. as he calls the play. | Dave Sizer photo

Move over Coach Taylor, Matty Saracen and Riggins, the University of Washington football team is hoarding in on your Friday Night Lights time slot.

On Friday morning, the Big Ten and FOX revealed its television lineup for Friday nights this coming season and the Huskies drew a pair of these weekday games -- on consecutive weeks.

The UW will host Iowa at 6 p.m. on October 9 and turn around play at Purdue at 5 p.m. on October 16 in West Lafayette, Indiana.

The Huskies, in fact, will have a bye week following those two Friday evening adventures, which means they'll go without a Saturday football game for three consecutive weekends in the heart of the college season.

Iowa's visit will mark the first time the Hawkeyes have played in Seattle since 1963, when they beat the Huskies 17-7 early in the season with Jim Owens' team ultimately playing in the Rose Bowl.

The UW will play at Purdue for the first time since 1990, when the Don James-coached Huskies took a 20-14 victory on the way to another Rose Bowl.

As far as the wide gap of no Saturday games, the Huskies will play at USC on October 3 on the weekend, deal with their two Friday games, have a bye week and then return to Saturday action at Nebraska on October 31.

That might be the largest absence of Saturday games during the season in a full 9- to 12-game UW schedule ever, or at least in modern times.

Friday, however, lately has a been a productive game day for the Huskies, who've won seven of 10 of these games going back to the 2019 season.

In Chris Petersen's final year as coach, they beat Oregon State 19-7 in Corvallis on November 8. and three weeks later topped Washington State 31-13 at the Apple Cup in Husky Stadium.

In 2021, the UW beat Jedd Fisch's Arizona team 21-16 in Tucson on October 22 and closed out the season with a 40-13 loss to WSU at home.

In 2022, Kalen DeBoer's Huskies split a pair of Friday night games by losing to UCLA 40-32 in late September at the Rose Bowl and beating Oregon State 24-21 on November 4 at home.

A year later, DeBoer's team had just one Friday outing -- in the Pac-12 Championship game against Oregon in Las Vegas and it went well. The Huskies won 34-31.

Under Fisch's direction, the UW is 2-1 on Fridays. The Huskies lost at Rutgers 21-18 in 2024 on September 27 and hosted and beat UCLA 31-19 on November 15 that season.

A year ago, the Huskies defeated Rutgers 39-19 on October 19 in Montlake.

Fisch, of course, just got done sending his latest team through a Friday night Spring Game a week ago.

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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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