Inside The Huskies

Penix Wins Maxwell Award, Named Camp All-America QB

The UW standout piles up the football honors on Friday.
Dan Raley|
Penix Wins Maxwell Award, Named Camp All-America QB
Penix Wins Maxwell Award, Named Camp All-America QB

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Washington Huskies

As the college football landscape has learned over six determined seasons, you can't keep Michael Penix Jr. down for long.

On Friday, the University of Washington quarterback was named the Maxwell Award winner, singled out as the game's most outstanding player, and then chosen to the first unit of the Walter Camp All-America team on the ESPN awards show.

These honors was bestowed on Penix after earlier in the week Oregon's Bo Nix was named ahead of him as the first-team All-Pac-12 quarterback and LSU signal-caller Jayden Daniels was selected as the Associated Press College Football Player of the Year.

All three of these players are in New York now as finalists awaiting announcement of the Heisman Trophy.

For now, the 6-foot-3, 213-pound Penix, after leading the UW to a 13-0 record and into the College Football Playoff, can take a sweeping bow as the winner of the Maxwell Award, one of the college game's top accolades and given out annually since 1937.

"It's something special for us," Penix said, seated with his family in an ESPN interview.

He also was picked to the Walter Camp first team, relegating Daniels to the second unit, as he turned up on the oldest All-America team selected, created in 1889. Husky teammate Rome Odunze joined Daniels on that second Camp squad. 

The Maxwell award is named for Robert "Tiny" Maxwell, who was an All-America guard for Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and later a coach and even a Philadelphia sports writer. He was just 37 when he died in 1922 in an auto-truck accident. 

Penix currently leads the nation in passing with 4,218 yards and a 324 per game average. In two seasons at the UW, he's directed the Huskies to a 24-2 record, which includes a 2022 Alamo Bowl victory and a recent Pac-12 championship.  

On Jan. 1, Penix and his teammates will face Texas (12-1) in the semifinals of the College Football Playoff in the Sugar Bowl.

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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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