Sorry for Your Loss: ASU Remains the Last Team to Beat the Huskies
When Washington kicks off against Arizona State on Saturday night at Husky Stadium, it will have been 378 days.
One year and just under two weeks.
Fourteen football games ago.
Two victories over Oregon and another over Texas.
Two athletic directors.
A Pac-12 break-up.
Add it all up, and that's how long it's been and what's taken place since Kalen DeBoer's Huskies last lost a football game. Came up on the short end on the scoreboard. Had anything but a smile on their faces when leaving football fields from East Lansing, Michigan, to San Antonio, Texas.
Which, when you think about this latest arc of Husky football success during this millennium, is really sort of mind-boggling, isn't it?
"It doesn't take much to realize what this game was a year ago as far as the impact it had looking back at the season, knowing that it's one that continually hurt our chances in having bigger opportunities whether it be a conference championship game or whatever it may be," DeBoer said this week.
"But I also know that maybe that was the game that really made us who we are, at that time understanding we can bounce back and what it takes to bounce back."
It's even more remarkable for the Huskies when considering it was just 15 years ago that Tyrone Willingham drove the football program into the ground with his guys subjected to an utterly demoralizing 0-12 season, a situation so precarious other places would have needed decades to recover.
It was 10 years ago that Steve Sarkisian dared use the UW as a career stepping stone to land another college football coaching job — something that's happened just three times (Gil Dobie and Darrell Royal were the others) in Montlake over 134 seasons — that seemed to besmirch Montlake as a place to work.
Just two years ago, the Huskies went through a miserable 4-8 season under Jimmy Lake that cost him his job and had the potential to keep the program in a state of mediocrity for a lengthy time.
Out of the gate, DeBoer has been incredibly successful, losing just twice in 19 games, by a measly eight and seven points to UCLA and those aforementioned Sun Devils, both on the road. Outside of the aforementioned Dobie, no Husky coach has been quite so dominant, and that man won a lot of games against athletic clubs and high schools..
Since getting tripped up 45-38 on a cool, cloudy day in Tempe, DeBoer's Huskies have won 13 consecutive games, the second longest streak in the nation to two-time, defending national champion Georgia, which is up to 24 victories in a row.
Chris Petersen won 12 consecutive games while taking the UW to the College Football Playoff, plus the Fiesta and Rose bowls.
So did Rick Neuheisel, who in his four seasons had most of his success come from a third-ranked, once-beaten Husky team that beat Purdie and Drew Brees in the Rose Bowl.
DeBoer's Huskies have the program's longest winning streak in 31 seasons, since Don James' 1991 and 1992 teams captured 22 games in row in and around a pair of Rose Bowl victories and a national championship run.
Next up is Arizona State, notable these days for the fact it beat DeBoer — in fact, as the last opponent to get the best of him and his team. Yet it's hardly the same Sun Devils from 2022.
Just five starters return, three of them in the secondary. Starting quarterback Emory Jones, who got knocked out of the game with a concussion, now plays for Cincinnati. Backup running back Daniyel Ngata, who scored a touchdown against the UW, now plays for the Huskies. Starting edge rusher Joe Moore, who committed to the UW in the offseason before changing his mind, comes off the bench for Missouri.
A year ago, Daniyel Ngata played for ASU against the Huskies. This weekend, it's reversed.
Joe Camporeale/USA TODAY Sports
This ASU team, in its restructuring, took the interesting though unconventional steps of raiding Idaho State for head coach Charlie Ragle and making him the Sun Devils assistant head coach, hiring his assistant Vince Amey and installing him as the ASU defensive-line coach and bringing in five Bengals players.
Again, these are Idaho State Bengals, not Cincinnati Bengals.
Former Oregon offensive coordinator Kenny Dillingham is the Sun Devils new coach and he's taken everything down to the studs as he conducts a massive rebuild of a program headed for the Big 12 Conference. It's been difficult.
He's 1-5, having beaten only lower-level Southern Utah and just barely, 24-21. Dillingham, of course, was on the losing side in the Huskies' 37-34 victory over the Ducks in Eugene last season.
"I would say this is one of the rare teams that has a difficult scheme with good players and a great quarterback, and not often do you have to play all three," Dillingham said of the UW earlier in the week.
"Usually you get to play a simple scheme and we're gonna beat you through our players and they have better players. Very rarely do you have to play a team that is super well-coached with great players that use that advantage."
The Sun Devils, in pulling their big upset at home last season, have three playmakers back who each had a significantg hand in how things turned out in their favor against the Huskies.
Junior wide receiver Elijah Badger, who should be lining up for Wisconsin with a name like that, returns after catching a pair of touchdowns against the Huskies, including the game-winner from 2 yards out to break a 38-all tie with more than seven minutes left to play.
In the secondary, Sun Devils senior nickelback Jordan Clark remains an unforgettable figure after he intercepted a Michael Penix Jr. ball that was deflected high in the air after it hit off the back of the helmet for 6-foot-7 offensive guard Jaxson Kirkland, who was pass-blocking for him, and Clark returned it 38 yards for a touchdown early in the second half.
Then there's junior reserve edge rusher B.J. Green. He delivered the most damaging hit on Penix all last season, leaving the Husky quarterback struggling to catch his breath and forcing him to leave the game for a play late in the fourth quarter and be replaced by Dylan Morris. Green, who goes 6-foot-1 and 270 pounds and hails from Atlanta, was ejected for targeting.
Memories, memories, memories.
It's hard to say when the smartly-coached and extra-talented Huskies will lose another football game, but it shouldn't be this weekend to a 1-5 Arizona State team trying to find its way with a new leader.
Of course, that's what everyone said a year ago in the desert.
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