Huskies Venture Into Rarified Air -- Playing on Sunday

This Apple Cup game will mark just the second time the UW has appeared in a game on the Sabbath.

Husky Stadium fills up as players head to the locker room before kickoff. | Skylar Lin Visuals

To illustrate how unusual this weekend's University of Washington football opener is against Washington State in the Apple Cup, the Huskies have played 1,311 games over 136 seasons and they've done the following only once before.

Play on a Sunday.

Details are scarce, but the one time that UW players previously had to rush home from church or finally crawl home from that extended frat party and engage in a football game on the Sabbath was on Oct. 16, 1892.

The Huskies have played multiple times on every other day of the week except for Sunday, which for most people outside of the NFL has long been considered a day of rest.

Or at the very most, they've practiced on Sunday, especially after a loss to get the bad taste out.

Yet that will change this weekend for the Huskies and Cougars, who will go for maximum national TV network exposure after being asked to move their game from Saturday to Sunday at 1 p.m.

"I' thought it was awesome and I'm all for it," UW coach Jedd Fisch said. "I told our team today, we're the only game at 1 o'clock. We're on NBC. It's an opportunity for for everybody who turns on the TV on Sunday and in the fall is looking for football. It just happened to be, surprise, it's college and it's us."

Sunday has been such an off limits day, that two of the UW's Rose Bowl appearances -- in 1961 and 1978 -- were moved to January 2 rather than played on the traditional New Year's Day that fell on Sunday those years and try to compete with the NFL.

The viewership projections for this UW-WSU game, which will precede a Notre Dame-Wisconsin match-up on NBC to create a Sunday doubleheader, is it could draw up to 6 million people tuning in.

A year ago, Virginia Tech and South Carolina played on a Sunday to open the season, on ESPN, and the game drew 5.4 million sets of eyes.

This could be a welcome marketing tool for the Huskies, who are trying to recruit coast to coast now and have more of a national presence.

"That 's our hope is that they all benefit from that, our fan base across the country and all the East Coast people, the media, the teams, Central time zone, Mountain time zone, that they're all turning it on because there's nothing else on," Fisch said.

The advantages surely will far outweigh what happened for that other Sunday game UW played 134 years ago, when there was no television, no Husky Stadium and no NIL.

It marked just the third game in Husky history. That same year, the students supposedly voted on making purple and gold the school colors.

Coach W.B. Goodwin's fledgling UW squad simply laced it up in 1892 and went out and took a 28-0 loss on the chin from the Seattle Athletic Club.

Maybe that's why, over the next 13-plus decades, the Huskies had never played another game on a Sunday. Until now.