Jedd Fisch Reaches UW Football Crossroad

This past Friday night at Husky Stadium, one of the most impressive things the Iowa football team did was simply take the field.

The Hawkeyes came out in perfectly aligned rows of players, synchronized in a tight cadence as they bobbed up and down as a group from one end of the visitors' bench area to the other.

Well-trained military regiments don't come together any better than this. It was like the film "300" with the troops arriving for battle.

They were intimidating. They were confident. They were ready to go to work.

Conversely, Jedd Fisch's University of Washington Huskies for the first 25 minutes of play looked about as unprepared for game day as any Montlake team since the ill-fated Jimmy Lake era that ended with a 4-8 team in 2021.

They couldn't block, tackle or cover anybody for much of the opening half. It was a team effort for a lack of commitment.

Worst of all, these Huskies showed almost no emotion in contrast to the visiting Hawkeyes who were all hyped up from the outset, leveling hits right and left, including lighting up Rahshawn Clark on a kickoff return.

"We're not playing good enough ball," UW coach Jedd Fisch said afterward. "We expect to be playing better than we're playing."

Landen Hatchett returned from a broken wrist to play against Iowa. | Dave Sizer photo

Fisch and his coaching peers will tell you it doesn't take much for a college program to completely unravel.

After all, Lake won three of four games in his rookie season during the COVID epidemic and then eight outings into the following season he was dismissed from his job.

And consider what was left in Montlake when Kalen DeBoer packed up his stuff and a dozen players, coaches and staff members and headed for Alabama, and the rest of the roster imploded following a national championship game appearance.

The Iowa game was overtly disturbing because the Huskies as a group appeared poorly coached if not totally unprepared.

Offensive guard Champ Taulealea grimaces during the 41-24 loss to Iowa. | Dave Sizer photo

This ran contrary to Fisch's coaching history of continual improvement, where his Arizona teams went from one to five to 10 wins in his time spent there and his Huskies jumped from six to nine victories last season to likely regressing to four or five wins this season.

While Fisch's 2024 patchwork UW team lost by four touchdowns each to Penn State and Oregon, this game felt worse in how the punishment was meted out.

The Huskies were dominated so thoroughly up front, on both sides of the ball, it was almost as if they had made no weight-room progress in Fisch's two and a half seasons.

His team finished with -3 yards rushing and no sacks against the Hawkeyes, while permitting 6 sacks and 208 yards rushing to Iowa's Kamari Moultron.

A rare moment of frivolity for Chris Lawson and Kolt Dieterich during the Iowa loss. | Dave Sizer photo

It was if the UW now has to start all over again in the pursuit of body makeovers in trying to gain ground on the conference blue bloods.

For that matter, Fisch looked and sounded as if he was in a state of shock during his postgame media session over what happened in the 41-24 loss to Iowa.

"We were not strong enough and stout enough to hold up at this point in time," the coach said. "We need to be bigger and stronger to do that."

Six games into his third UW season, starting quarterback Demond Williams Jr. has lost all confidence in his play. Now he's dealing with some sort of injury for the first time, possibly a rib issue. The fans are lined up against him. It's as if he's been cursed since the Husky signal-caller considered a near transfer last winter.

With six games left on the schedule, more unpleasant losses are expected at the hands of Penn State, Indiana and Oregon.

The biggest danger in a sudden losing season is it sends a message you're no longer making progress and this can compel players to run to the transfer portal, to teams promising a more upbeat environment.

Assistant coaches often get fired, sacrificed for team shortcomings, a counter message to mollify a disgruntled fan base. Things get messy.

The gravity of this moment likely is not lost on Fisch, who now has to address everything to avoid a total meltdown.

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