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Inside The Huskies

Paki Finau Becomes Third UW Offensive Lineman to Turn to Portal

The California native started four Husky games this past season.
Dan Raley|
Paki Finau has opted for the transfer portal.
Paki Finau has opted for the transfer portal. | Dave Sizer photo

Paki Finau, considered a poster boy for player development for the University of Washington football team, will let someone else enjoy the fruits of his labors after announcing on Thursday that he will enter the transfer portal.

The 6-foot-5, 310-pound offensive guard from Hesperia, California, painstakingly put on 40 pounds of playing weight as a freshman in 2024 and then became a starter for four games this past season as he continued to make steady progress in Montlake.

Yet Finau will become the 12th UW player to disclose his intentions to shop himself around in the portal. He is the Huskies' third offensive lineman to do this, joining sophomore center Zach Henning and senior offensive tackle in Max McCree.

With three seasons of eligibility remaining, Finau is considered a fairly significant loss, same as sophomore running back Adam Mohammed and freshman wide receiver Raiden Vines-Bright, because all three were part-time starters who were projected for greater roles at some point.

Yet Finau likely was going to be asked to be patient for yet another season with both starting guards returning in freshman standout John Mills and sixth-year senior Geirean Hatchett, with the latter receiving a waiver to play a seventh seson.

A 4-star recruit who was raised in California's high desert, Finau was considered one of the prize players of the UW's 2024 class. He chose to stick with Jedd Fisch's new UW staff even after originally signing with Kalen DeBoer's coaches before that coach left for Alabama.

After first reporting to the Huskies weighing in the high 260s, Finau methodically changed his body size over the course of the winter and the 2024 season with uninterrupted weight room work.

He made token late-game appearances in the first three outings when he was a freshman and then didn't play again until the Sun Bowl against Louisville, when he was used for nearly the entire second half of a 35-34 loss to Louisville.

Paki Finau played three positions in the UCLA game last weekend.
Paki Finau played three positions in the UCLA game last weekend. | Dave Sizer photo

This past season, Finau was beat out for the left guard starting role by Mills, but it was envisioned that some day those two would start at the guards together.

Finau later replaced an injured Mills as the starter for two games at midseason and then took over as the starter again once Mills moved to right tackle temporarily as an injury replacement for then junior Drew Azzopardi.

Against UCLA, he showed off his versatility by playing three different positions in the game -- at both guard spots and at right tackle.

And now Finau will make himself available to become an immediate starter somewhere else.

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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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