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Inside The Huskies

The Argument For Greatest UW Football Player Ever

Someone suggested it was Warren Moon, but we digress on that selection.
Dan Raley|
Hugh McElhenny looks despondent sitting on the bench for the Minnesota Vikings during the 1961 season.
Hugh McElhenny looks despondent sitting on the bench for the Minnesota Vikings during the 1961 season. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

You can find a list online for just about anything related to college football these days, especially when whiling away the final days of summer, the sport's dead time.

Greatest team, player, coach, stadium, mascot, school beverage, this stuff goes on and on.

The problem with this sort of information sharing is the authors rarely have a good feel for the game anywhere west of the Rockies, which isn't entirely their fault.

After all, look what happened to the Pac-12. Its early rendition was one of the leagues blown up for cheating back in the 1950s. It's hardly recognizable now after recent realignment.

Regardless, we're here to take issue with the latest list and how it pertains to the University of Washington football team -- greatest player in program history.

The list-maker settled on Warren Moon.

Let us dissect that selection as if we were carving up a Thanksgiving turkey.

While Moon went on to become a Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee, he was a great Husky football player for all of eight games, two in particular.

Legendary coach Don James brought Moon to Montlake in 1975 as a junior-college player and a sophomore, and gave him the starting job and took it away from him that year.

The following season, the quarterback was booed mercilessly by Husky Stadium fans as the starter of an underachieving 5-6 team.

In 1977, Moon and the Huskies opened the schedule 1-3 before good things finally begin to happen.

By the end of that season, he had led his UW team to stirring victories over USC 20-10 in Husky Stadium and Michigan 27-20 in the Rose Bowl, earning Pac-8 co-Player of the Year and Rose Bowl Most Valuable Player.

The Huskies finished 8-4.

Warren Moon turns to hand off in the 1978 Rose Bowl against Michigan.
Warren Moon turns to hand off in the 1978 Rose Bowl against Michigan. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

A good player for sure, but Moon, whose son Ryken currently is a Husky running back, was hardly the greatest of all time.

Who then?

In our minds, only two players qualify for that exalted status: Hugh McElhenny and Steve Emtman.

McElhenny, who was 93 when he died in 2022, turned UW football into such a big deal his presence led to donors not only paying him exorbitant sums -- well before NIL -- but to pay for the first Husky Stadium upper deck that was installed in 1950 because of the wide-scale interest in the running back.

That same year, he played for the first Husky team ever ranked in the Associated Press poll, one that spent seven weeks among the nation's best and was 18th at the season's end.

Most of all, McElhenny could score at any time. He went 100 yards to the end zone with a punt return against USC and 91 yards against Kansas State, 83 against Washington State, 69 against Stanford and 58 against Oregon State, all for rushing touchdowns, and 77 against Illinois, 65 against California and 59 against UCLA, for receiving scores.

If McElhenny is not your guy, it's Emtman, the 6-foot-4, 290-pound defensive tackle and the most decorated player in UW football history.

While leading the Huskies to a 12-0 season and a co-national championship in 1991, he was named as a first-team All-American, the Outland, Lombardi and Morris award winners, and the No. 1 NFL Draft pick.

He was as dominant in the trenches as any player who has come through Montlake.

Steve Emtman (90) is shown in action against Oregon in 1991.
Steve Emtman (90) is shown in action against Oregon in 1991. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

The only question about Emtman's UW career was whether it was aided by something performance-enhancing to make it happen, but he strongly denied it.

So there you have it. Moon represents an uplifting part of Husky football history, but the greatest players were McElhenny and Emtman.

Take your pick; McElhenny for thrills and chills, Emtman for sheer power and fear factor.

Personally, we vote for Hurrying Hugh.

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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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