Road to 1991 Perfection: Rongen's Party Became Wake After UCLA's Upset in '90

Kris Rongen and the 1991 University of Washington football team entered Week 10 fully cognizant of what happened the previous year in the same game with a national championship on the line.

They blew it.

The second-ranked Huskies took on heavy underdog UCLA at home and did a 25-22 face plant.

Twelve months later, Rongen and his UW teammates, again No. 2 in the polls, traveled to face overmatched Oregon State in Corvallis. They took out their past frustrations on the Beavers, routing them 58-6.

Yet the nightmare of frittering away the UCLA game and more never left the Huskies.

Rongen was a starting offensive guard for the 1991 Huskies, a little-used reserve for the '90. He had a front-row seat for the upset.

"I was on the sideline, having my chew and my cookie and enjoying the game," said Rongon, now a state corrections officer in Olympia, Washington. "It was dumbfounding. How are we getting our asses handed to us? We got destroyed by UCLA."

This is another in series of vignettes about the UW 1991 national championship team, supplementing the conversation for the pandemic-delayed season. We're in week 10, which sent the Huskies to Oregon State, looking to clinch a Rose Bowl berth and conference title.

Rongen was the designated team party host on that 1990 weekend. He had four kegs of beer set up in his Seattle apartment. No one envisioned anything but a night of celebrating.

"That party went from a full-on party to a remodel job," Rongen said. "There were parts of my apartment that were missing."

He went from special-teams player to starter from one season to the next. Because of that UCLA game, there were no Husky slip-ups at Oregon State, no stumbles anywhere.

Still, it gnaws at him to think about what might have been, to know what was squandered. That giveaway game became a rallying cry in '91.

"We could have been back-to-back national champions," Rongen said.

Follow Dan Raley of Husky Maven on Twitter: @DanRaley1 and @HuskyMaven

Find Husky Maven on Facebook by searching: HuskyMaven/Sports Illustrated

Click the "follow" button in the top right corner to join the conversation on Husky Maven. Access and comment on featured stories and start your own conversations and post external links on our community page.