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Inside The Huskies

Huskies Turn Up In Three Preseason Top 25 Polls

The Coaches Poll considers the UW a top 20 football team.
Dan Raley|
The Huskies crowd around Demond Williams Jr. as he calls a Spring Game play.
The Huskies crowd around Demond Williams Jr. as he calls a Spring Game play. | Dave Sizer photo

As Jedd Fisch stood at the podium while addressing the media to discuss the start of University of Washington football fall camp, the coach remarked how he had been on a steady offseason speaking tour and was ready for practice to begin.

He next sent sort of an usual directive to his attentive news-gathering audience.

"Hopefully you guys can write about what happens on the field rather then speculation," he said.

Sorry coach, we're not quite there yet.

We're not totally done with the silly season and all of its meandering thoughts about everything Huskies and college football.

For instance, three football rankings recently dropped and the Coaches Poll had the UW slotted 19th while a pair of polls from football podcasters put them 13th and 18th.

Considering the limited national attention sent the Huskies' way since their 2023 run to the College Football Playoff championship game and the subsequent rebuild, that's progress.

The long-running Coaches Poll, of course, carries the most weight of these three offerings and the Huskies forever are staunch supporters of it.

In 1991, it was the then-USA Today/CNN Coaches Poll that declared Don James' 12-0 UW team as the national champion while the Associated Press went with Miami, making for co-champs.

This time, the Huskies are wedged between Tennessee and SMU in what seems like a logical placement as Fisch keeps upping the talent level in Montlake each year.

Even more optimistic about the UW is a surprising source -- George Wrighster III.

He's a former Oregon Duck and NFL football player who hosts The Unafraid Show and, unlike others from his school, is unafraid to show a little respect to the Northwest rival once in a while.

Wrighster has the Huskies ranked 13th between USC and Ole Miss. He also rather optimistically has Oregon ranked No. 1.

Finally, there's Elliott of CBS Sports and the Cover3 podcast and he placed the Huskies 19th, between SMU and Penn State.

He likewise has Oregon sitting on top of his poll.

Who knows, maybe it's the year of the Ducks.

Counter to other offerings, the redeeming thing about these three football polls is the absence of teams that are just a total reach to be included in any rankings at this time. We're talking schools such as California, UCLA and Oklahoma State.

Each has undergone a coaching change and completely redone its roster, and the element of change proved overly attractive to other pollsters who simply couldn't resist ranking them.

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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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