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Inside The Huskies

Huskies Earn Lofty Spot in First AP Top 25

The UW had been ranked for just one week since playing in the 2023 national championship game.
Dan Raley|
John Mills and Demond Williams Jr. chest bump each other.
John Mills and Demond Williams Jr. chest bump each other. | Dave Sizer photo

Holding considerable promise, the University of Washington football team will begin the upcoming season with a No. 17 ranking in the first Associated Press poll, which seems reasonable enough since the Huskies return two-thirds of their starters after finishing 9-4 in 2025.

The UW finds itself slotted between Michigan and Penn State among the second 10 in what's always been considered the most respected of all of the polls out there.

Released nearly two weeks ago, the Coaches Poll had the Huskies ranked No. 19.

Three years since the UW finished as the national runner-up with Kalen DeBoer as coach, his replacement Jedd Fisch has steadily rebuilt the Huskies with an influx of talent, in particular adding enormous and high-level offensive linemen in John Mills and Kodi Greene to withstand the rigors of the Big Ten.

A pair of former Husky football coaches have teams ranked higher than the UW, with Steve Sarkisian's Texas entry pegged as the nation's No. 5 team and DeBoer's latest Alabama Crimson Tide coming in at No. 13.

Besides Mills and Greene anchoring the offensive line, the UW returns Demond Williams Jr., who's possibly the fastest quarterback among the Power 4 teams, and defensive unit is built around four fairly accomplished linebackers, among them Jacob Manu.

The Huskies also have a highly favorable schedule with their first four games at home and a decent possibility of going 10-0 before closing out the regular season against Indiana at home and Oregon on the road.

The Hoosiers, the defending national champions, are ranked sixth by the AP while the Ducks hold down the lofty poll position of being No. 2.

Of course, the UW will need to be at its best at all times because it faces five of the teams in this preseason AP Top 25 in Penn State, Iowa, USC, Indiana and Oregon.

Ohio State is the No. 1-ranked team. The Huskies and Buckeyes don't meet during the regular season.

Fisch's team is one of eight Big Ten teams included in the AP rankings while the SEC has nine.

Since spending the entire 2023 season ranked in the Top 25, the Huskies have been ranked just once by the AP over the past seasons -- 24th going into a Wisconsin game that they lost 13-10 in Madison.

Even after beating Boise State 38-10 in the LA Bowl to finish with nine victories in 13 outings, the UW came out of last season unranked.

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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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