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Mack Makes It Official With UW Signing, Will Report in June

The young quarterback from Northern California turns in his national letter of intent.
Dan Raley|
Mack Makes It Official With UW Signing, Will Report in June
Mack Makes It Official With UW Signing, Will Report in June

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Washington Huskies

If he's as good as everyone says, Austin Mack will never see a senior year of school at any level — not in high school, not in college.

On Wednesday, the 6-foot-6, 210-pound quarterback from Folsom, California, and Folsom High School, officially accelerated his University of Washington football experience and put it in motion by signing his national letter of intent.

Just a junior, Mack has roughly three and a half months of high school classes remaining before he packs his bags as a reclassified college football player, graduates a full year earlier than his classmates and leaves his prison town made famous in song by Johnny Cash for his own fame and fortune in Montlake.

With the state prison and Folsom High just three miles apart, Mack is giving up the senior prom, any senior sneak days that might be tradition and a senior game night in football.

In Seattle, he'll find the closest prison to campus is 27 miles north in Monroe, Washington, at the Monroe Correctional Complex.

Mack follows in the Folsom football footsteps of fellow high-profile quarterbacks Jake Browning and Dano Graves, with Browning also proving to be in a bit of hurry to be a college quarterback, though he forfeited none of his high school class time.

Browning, of course, showed up at the UW in 2015 and immediately became the Huskies' starting quarterback as a freshman and kept the job for four seasons, something that hadn't happened before or since. Prior to that, Jake Locker from Ferndale, Washington, redshirted his first season in 2006 as a Husky quarterback before spending the next three and a half seasons as the starter, with a broken thumb costing him half a season. 

Dano Graves?

He was a short, option quarterback who led the Folsom High Bulldogs to a 2010 state championship before spending two seasons at Air Force and finishing up at Cal Poly. 

Mack will join a UW quarterback competition that is headlined by 6-foot-3, 213-pound sixth-year senior Michael Penix Jr., who led the nation in passing yards per game with 357, and 6-foot, 197-pound fifth-year junior Dylan Morris, who started for two seasons and was the shortest first-team Husky quarterback over the past four decades.

This newcomer from the Bay Area will be among the tallest UW quarterbacks, matching the 6-foot-6, 230-pound Jacob Eason (2019 starter) for height and just topping the 6-foot-5, 220-pound Brock Huard (1995-98) and 6-foot-5, 195-pound Al Libke (1963-65, converted to tight end). 

Mack will arrive this summer and join the Huskies for fall football drills, readily assuming the No. 3 spot on the quarterback depth chart while learning his trade. He and Morris should be in competition for the starting job in 2024, when local QB recruit EJ Caminong from Seattle's Garfield High School joins everyone as a freshman.

This past season at Folsom, Mack completed 269 of 382 passes for 3,448 yards and 40 touchdowns, with just 5 interceptions, for a 12-2 team, numbers that sort of made a senior year moot. Now he'll see if he can play well enough to leave the UW early, too.

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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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