Washington and Jedd Fisch, the last of the Pac-12's endless surprises, team up
Both sides of this deal know chaos—and both have found ways to harness it, to create calm within the storm.
Note: rankings for this series are set by the final 2023 rankings from TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings.
There are plenty of reasons to mourn the death of the Pac-12. It was emblematic of college football’s deep connections to history and tradition—a league with lineage stretching back to the 1910s, and one which had maintained the majority of its membership since the 1920s. The very existence of the sport’s postseason traces its roots to the Rose Bowl, held in a Pac-12 stadium and consistently featuring a team from the conference for most of its existence. And beyond college football, its preeminence in NCAA sports as a whole is unmatched, a history of all-around excellence that lent it the moniker “Conference of Champions”.1
But…perhaps a bit selfishly, the thing I’ll most miss about the conference is the role it served in the sport over its final few years, to its own detriment. The league’s longstanding inability to reach the CFP, with just three total bids and none between 2017 and 2022, was a factor in its eventual collapse (if, arguably, a minor one), and that drought was a direct result of its greatest strength as an entertainment product: chaos.
“Pac-12 After Dark” is a meme for a reason. During the playoff era, the conference carved out a niche as mainly late-night programming (for those of us out east) that tended to serve as a sideshow to the more title-relevant games that filled earlier timeslots. If you were willing to stay up for the 10:00 PM kickoffs, you were almost invariably treated to something that could only ever happen in the dead of night, tucked away on some tiny regional channel that you definitely had access to and weren’t pirating. Maybe it was the game where UCLA overcame a 49-17 deficit to stun WSU 67-63 (in regulation!), or the game where Mario Cristobal’s Oregon declined to kneel out the clock and fumbled to Stanford in a game they’d ultimately find a way to lose.2 And quite often, it was a purported playoff contender getting embarrassed by some team they had no business losing to—USC rocketing past BCS hopeful Oregon in 2011, Utah giving the Trojans a taste of their own medicine in the 2022 conference championship, or the Ducks rolling past the Utes in the title game three years earlier.
The conference’s final season, in 2023, wasn’t quite so wild. There weren’t all too many upsets, at least in retrospect; only four ranked teams fell to unranked opponents in league play, and none of those victims actually finished anywhere close to the top 25. And that relative calm opened the door for two of the most chaotic outcomes the Pac-12 had seen in a long time—a national championship run from a Washington team that had been 4-8 just two years ago, and a ten-win season from an Arizona team that hadn’t gone bowling in six years.
Despite that remarkable swan song, the conference is still effectively dead now. But if any traces of its inimitable chaos live on outside of Pullman and Corvallis, they’re likeliest to turn up here, at the reigning national runners-up. The Huskies are one of those two Pac-12 teams that caught lightning in a bottle last year, holding their CFP bid together through countless close calls down the stretch and taking down Texas in the semifinals before falling to Michigan in the title game. And after losing Kalen DeBoer, the architect of that stunning season, to the sport’s preeminent superpower in Alabama…they took the coach of the other 2023 stunner as a going-away gift.
Jedd Fisch, who took over one of the worst power programs in the country in 2021 and got them to the brink of the New Year’s Six by 2023, is obviously a fantastic hire. Beyond the simple fact that his brief history as a head coach is incredibly impressive, his demonstrated knack for a tough rebuild dovetails nicely with the exodus of talent Washington experienced after losing most of their championship roster to the portal, to graduation, and to the NFL. But I think the Huskies also picked him, in part, because he represents the chaos they harnessed in that final year.
Three of those four ranked teams that lost in Pac-12 play fell to Arizona, in a spectacular three-game stretch that propelled Fisch’s Wildcats to their first AP Poll ranking since 2017. He’s no stranger to playing the underdog, not just at the start of the rebuild but also at the end—and with Washington’s move to the Big Ten, that’s an attribute that’ll always serve him well. The Huskies face five ranked teams this season, including top-ten foes Michigan, Penn State, and Oregon, and that’s what their schedule will look like just about every year from now on. Washington won in 2023 because they didn’t flinch in their biggest moments, against their best opponents, and Fisch’s Arizona won for the same reasons.
Sure, the Big Ten isn’t the Pac-12.3 The path to success here isn’t necessarily going to involve knowing, say, how to wriggle out of a five-fumble game at Arizona State and keep a playoff résumé intact. But the identity Washington built last year made them a titan in that famously-treacherous conference and a serious title contender on the national stage, as evidence by their back-and-forth win over Texas in the Sugar Bowl. After DeBoer’s abrupt departure, the Huskies are wise to stick with what’s been working, and pulling the best up-and-coming coach from within their dissolving conference makes all the sense in the world. There are plenty of unknowns ahead—a new league, a new playoff system, an almost entirely new roster, and a new coach—but Fisch and Washington have both weathered uncertain circumstances before and come out stronger. There couldn’t be a more fitting hire for the Huskies as they press onward, and bid farewell to the tumultuous landscape of the Pac-12.
The Last Five Years
Notice that huge jump from the end of 2021 (and Jimmy Lake’s disastrous tenure) to the start of 2022 (and DeBoer’s fantastic one)? It’s not a consequence of TERSE liking what it saw from Washington’s new coach; that’s not a factor in the system. No, that leap from the bottom rungs of the P5 to the crowded midfield of potential contenders was mainly a resulting of excellent returning production. The Huskies brought back a stunning 72% of their roster that year despite coaching turnover, and DeBoer took full advantage to nearly triple their win total and lead them to an Alamo Bowl victory in his very first season at the helm.
This debut is probably going to be rather different. Washington returns just 42% of its superb 2023 team, 124th in the nation, and has the country’s second-worst offensive returns after only woeful ULM. The Huskies are so completely different that they earned absolutely no benefit of the doubt from the preseason AP Poll, becoming the first national runner-up to miss the next year’s first rankings since 1951. That’s not to say there’s no reason for optimism, though—Mississippi State transfer Will Rogers provides some stability at QB, he’s got a decent skill corps to work with, and UW should be solid on defense if they can figure out how to replace a fully-overhauled pass rush. Falling somewhere around the first few teams out of the top 25 might actually be about right for them, and playoff contention isn’t out of the question if they can pull a major upset and take care of business elsewhere.
The Next Five Years
Given that Washington just lost a head coach, it’s a bit unfortunate that Fisch’s career necessarily invites the question of whether he’ll stick around long-term, too. He’s held some eighteen jobs over the last 27 years, and only twice has he stayed in any role for more than two seasons at a time. Pair that history with his extensive ties to Florida, where he went to college in the hopes of working under then–Gators HC Steve Spurrier, and the risk of a departure in short order is impossible to ignore. If Billy Napier doesn’t conjure up a miracle in the next year or two, UF is almost certainly going to come calling at some point.
There’s reason to believe Fisch wouldn’t necessarily answer with an immediate yes, though. In conversation with The Athletic’s Bruce Feldman, he offered some unusually candid perspective on his decision process when Washington came calling last year, revealing a thought process that wasn’t quite as automatic as many coaches’ would’ve been in his position. “It wasn’t just the traditional five-year deal,” he told Feldman, “and because of that, it was too good of an opportunity not to go to the Big Ten.”
That speaks volumes about what Fisch considers significant—both that Washington wanted him to stay for good (offering a seven-year contract), and that joining the Huskies meant he’d be coaching in the top tier of college football. Arizona, through no fault of their own, wasn’t in a position to counter either of those attractive factors…but neither Florida nor anybody else is in a position to one-up the length of Fisch’s contract at Washington or the strength of the conference he’s in now. If he’s still here in five years, and potentially signing an extension for more to come, it’ll be because the Huskies looked beyond the next five years to ensure they hired a coach who fits this program perfectly.
Of course, because this is college football, almost everything in that paragraph is technically wrong. The Pac-12 does still exist in some form, and it arguably only came about in 1968 when the AAWU dissolved and reformed to create it…or in 2011, I guess, if you’re a real stickler about the name. The Rose Bowl also predates the conference and didn’t have an official tie to it for a while, though they’ve always been at least loosely associated.
Yep. He did it at Oregon, too.
…well, almost a quarter of it is former Pac-12 teams, but you get what I mean.