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Inside The Huskies

UW Deals With CFB Silly Season High And Low In Same Day

The Huskies both elevate past multiple blue bloods and completely disappear.
Dan Raley|
The Huskies crowd around Demond Williams Jr. as he calls a Spring Game play.
The Huskies crowd around Demond Williams Jr. as he calls a Spring Game play. | Dave Sizer photo

It's June 1, and college football's silly season is in full throttle.

Every day now, everyone's got a list or a poll on just about any topic sizing up the game and its finer points, and often times at this time of year these things veer off into the land of the ridiculous.

If University of Washington football followers were paying attention on Monday, they would note how the Huskies might have hit a prognosticator's high and a low all in a single day over over how people on the outside view them for the upcoming season.

First, the optimistic news for those keeping track in Montlake: The Athletic, or the New York Times, specifically college football observer Stewart Mandel, envisions the UW as the nation's No. 15 team -- which might be a forecast high so far this offseason.

Yet what's overly interesting about Mandel's Top 25 is not so much how far the Jedd Fisch's third team has ascended, it's who it passed on the way up.

Consider that from the traditional Big Ten bully pulpit, Michigan is 17th and Penn State is 21st.

The shocker, however, is who sits between the Wolverines and the Nittany Lions.

At No. 19 is Alabama.

Current employer of former UW coach Kalen DeBoer, who finds himself looking up at the Huskies for the first time since he left for his new job in the Deep South in January 2024.

While some people will forever be grateful for his two-year Husky stint, which brought a run to the College Football Playoff national championship game, others wish him nothing but the worst after his departure contributed to a 14-1 team turning into an immediate rebuild.

Mandel's thumbnail assessment of the next UW team goes like this:

"Jedd Fisch’s third season nearly went sideways before it began when star QB [Demond] Williams tried to enter the portal in January despite re-signing. He ultimately reversed course, and the Huskies can continue building after improving from 6-7 to 9-4 last season. Washington quietly finished in the top 20 in defense last season."

Once all of that sunk in came the head-scratcher poll produced by something called BrowieCFB.

It was't a matter of the Huskies slipping to a low-hanging spot on this totem pole, it's that they were nowhere to be found -- and this poll went 30 teams deep.

While the UW returns two-thirds of its starting lineup from a 38-10 beatdown of Boise State in the LA Bowl, those very same Broncos are predicted finish at No. 24.

It seems like a real stretch that teams such as New Mexico, James Madison, Western Michigan, Western Kentucky and, of course, Boise State would be slotted higher than the Huskies with their latest collection of glossy personnel.

After all, didn't someone offer UW quarterback Demond Williams Jr. upwards of $6 million to take his talents elsewhere?

It's full speed ahead for the silly season.

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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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