The Washington Huskies Are Playing For A National Championship
and I wrote this in less than 24 hours and haven't edited it in the slightest. sorry, but not really.
My mom, my sister, and I stepped out of the Padelford Hall’s parking garage, into the welcoming March rain, onto a part of the University of Washington’s campus I’d never seen before. The pieces of campus I’d seen before were the centerpiece attractions, confined to memory. The place seemed backwards anew, the dove trees and silverbells and countless arrangements of firs and maples and oaks approaching me, rather than I approaching them, like I was walking into and through a funhouse mirror. My older brother is a UW graduate, and there’s an old picture in my parent’s house of him, wearing a cotton charcoal-colored Huskies t-shirt, hugging six or seven-year old me to his chest. I decided then and there I wanted to attend the same school.
The following ten years was an assortment of events that seemed, in the moment, to be pressure I put on myself, a drive to make the grades to get into the “Public Ivy” thirty minutes from my middle school. What they were, really, was an adolescent process of burnout: my first experience with a sensation I wouldn’t even learn the name of until I had almost graduated from the place. My friends from high school and I bonded over how deeply we loathed taking the classes and doing the extracurriculars that were apparent guarantees for college acceptance; we reminisce now over how little we remember of the middle years of high school. I remember almost nothing of AP World History, and the honors English classes that came along with that. I remember the English teacher I had for that class, sophomore year, and again the following year in AP Lang, for only one thing: she single handedly destroyed any interest I had in reading or writing. I burned out of my role as one of the school newspaper and yearbook editors, because at a certain point it turned into more English homework. Skimming Candide at 15 going on 16 was enough for one day. (My AP World teacher was cool enough, but only when the partition between the classrooms was closed.) I don’t know if I gave up on going to UW, or if the idea of further academic rigor was enough to convince me not to go there at all. But I was going to college: obviously.
The campus tour was scheduled for 3:30 on a Wednesday afternoon in the spring of 2016, my junior year of high school. I got out of school early on Wednesdays, so we headed over to campus early and met the friends from out of town who were taking the same tour. My friend Ben’s parents went to UW, and though they moved to Missouri before he started high school, he was still aiming to come back to Seattle for college. We met in the student union, the Husky Union Building, the HUB. My mom and I were ordering from the Starbucks in the iridescent center of the ground floor, and then I wandered the food court that I did not know most universities have in their own student unions. These were the sorts of wonders awaiting each batch of incoming freshmen; the trick is that they feel novel, unique to everyone’s dream school. The campus tour started upstairs and then back out into the mist, through Red Square and the quad and its cherry blossoms, just about to bloom and crush students with their admirers. Maybe half the tour had umbrellas; Ben’s family had stuck to their Seattle bona fides and trusted the hoods of their rain jackets. We went to dinner at the nearby outdoor mall, U-Village; I only remember these details because I remember how completely my mind was blown. How completely reinvigorated I felt. But I didn’t have enough time.
I didn’t get into UW, of course I didn’t. My grades weren’t good enough; my extracurriculars were commonplace. Ben didn’t get in either. In fact, most of my friends and many of my classmates didn’t. It seemed like a lot of out-of-state students did get in: a rumor we all used as a scapegoat, but never confirmed. I went out-of-state too, to the University of Colorado, but that was untenable. I realized that about a month after I moved into my triple-bed dorm, in the middle of campus in Boulder. I was happy where I was, but it wasn’t fulfilling in the way I’d been told the college experience was supposed to be.
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In the fall of 2016, the Washington Huskies football team was the school’s best, in my lifetime, perhaps ever. Chris Petersen was in his second season as the head coach, their roster included a dozen or more players who would go on to start in the NFL. The Huskies won the Pac-12, losing only once, to USC; they qualified for the third College Football Playoff, where they lost to Alabama in the Peach Bowl in Atlanta, 24-7.
That game always felt closer than the final score, but it also felt much more desperate early in the game for the Huskies than for Alabama. They were better than ever, but they were clearly not even close to good enough. At the time, quarterback Jake Browning was a sophomore, and Petersen brought countless talented players to Seattle on both sides of the ball throughout Browning’s time at UW. The Huskies kept winning the Pac-12, and they kept losing the big bowl games. Penn State running back Saquon Barkley ran wild over the toothsome UW defense in the 2018 Fiesta Bowl; Ohio State dominated the Rose Bowl the following year, and UW’s comeback attempt ran out of time. The Huskies won the Las Vegas Bowl (who cares) at the end of 2019, but shortly thereafter Petersen announced his retirement and plans to hand over the reins to his defensive coordinator Jimmy Lake. I maintain that Lake’s tenure as head coach was disrupted severely by the pandemic: UW played just four games in 2020, and when the following season went off the rails in the wake of an embarrassing 31-10 loss to Michigan -- a highly-touted, early-season, out-of-conference matchup -- Lake’s contract was bought out by the university. The offense under John Donovan was profoundly incompetent, and the defense was too inexperienced to keep offenses in games.
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I transferred from Colorado to Washington at the beginning of 2019, the start of winter quarter thanks to a quarter at a nearby community college. My credits transferred to the community college and were transmogrified into credits that worked at UW. It was a tiresome process -- and in hindsight, not particularly worth it. But how was I to know.
I lived in an off-campus apartment building owned by the university, along Pacific Avenue across the street from Portage Bay. It was basically a dorm with a bigger common space, a kitchen, and separate bedrooms and bathrooms for everyone. Most nights I would come home late from studying at one of the hallowed on-campus libraries, or at the HUB if I could find a seat to myself. I made dinner or ate something I picked up on the walk home, smoking a few bowls along the way. I blew the smoke out of my seventh-floor window, watching for birds or the rare coyote, wandering the walkways between buildings in the golden glow of the shoreside dusk. I watched Mad Men for the first time at some point during this time, and I also watched a lot of clips from Joe Rogan’s podcast on YouTube. I usually had no more than one afternoon class on Fridays, so I woke up early Friday mornings and went to the student gym to swim or go to a morning yoga class before returning to the greasy spoon five minutes from my apartment. (I think discovering yoga around this time may have saved my life.) Like so many others on a campus that numbered over fifty thousand people, I had few friends. Majors at UW are notoriously selective, and the 100-level classes were so big that it was easy to lose myself in the lectures. I didn’t know what I wanted out of this thing that I had wanted so badly.
The days and nights were slower in Colorado. I missed the routine of going to the library after class with a gym bag, studying for exactly two hours, working out for however long I felt like it, and somehow fitting in showers and food before disappearing into the basement dorm that my friends lived in every night to get stoned and play NCAA Football or watch a movie or hours of YouTube clips. Farrand Hall is almost the dead center of the original CU campus, and if it isn’t then Farrand Field across the centrifugal driveway probably is. It’s one of the oldest dorms on the campus, and some of the friends I’d made over the summer lived at the top of the building and some lived at what could have been the cornerstone. My dorm was on the fourth floor, somehow directly in between everything else, or at least equidistant. I get lost just thinking about trying to get around Farrand. I wonder if I could make my way from my room to any of my friends’. I reckon I probably could.
I didn’t know what I wanted out of being at UW because I just wanted to be there, and I loathed being there most days. It was sort of a preparation for the monotony that being an adult actually is, a dirty little secret no one is willing to admit. But that was supposed to come later. I was still in an enviable stage of life, and the adults who had reached the monotony and lived to tell the tale -- those I knew, those I didn’t -- thought I would like to hear what they had to say. I figured I should. So I took the accounting classes, the business law class, whatever else I needed to take just to apply to the Foster School of Business. I didn’t know what I was doing even when I got in. The few friends I had made, studying one day in the business library, all got in as well. We were a mix of students from in and out of Washington, but I felt like I got some revenge.
I didn’t like any of the business classes I took in the first two quarters of my junior year, but by the end of 2019 I had a stable friend group. We all took classes together. I got an internship at a portfolio management firm in downtown Seattle. I figured I’d keep pushing through. I was pleased that the university excused all students from their winter quarter finals in March of 2020.
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I graduated from UW at my parents’ house in June of 2021 and had stepped foot on campus maybe twice in eighteen months when UW hired Kalen DeBoer to be the new head football coach. Less than a month after he was hired, DeBoer recruited Indiana quarterback Michael Penix, Jr. to start for the Huskies in 2022. I had been beaten down so thoroughly by trying to finish college during the pandemic, and was so livid at all that was transpiring both in my life and the world around me, that I barely cared to see what DeBoer would do with the potential he’d inherited. I had heard legend of his exploits as an NAIA coach, where he went 67-3 in five years as the coach at the University of Sioux Falls and won three NAIA championships. His offense at Fresno State was the best Pac-12 After Dark experience you could find. But no one expected what has happened at Washington to happen this rapidly.
If you’re reading this you probably know by now that Washington is going to play for a national championship tonight. If they win, it would be the first time in the championship game era that they would be sole national champions. Penix should have won the Heisman Trophy. DeBoer did win National Coach of the year. The duo is 26-2 in two seasons in Seattle. And at a time when the Seahawks are mediocre, the Mariners are cheap losers, and golf and soccer are selling out, this team, despite all the change for the better as well as the possibly evident amorality of college football…this team has been quite the light.
It’s especially shocking to the friends with whom I suffered through Zoom UW. How cynical we all felt about the university, its athletic department, and the college experience at large. And how on top of the world we feel now. And how fitting it is that this game comes against Michigan, who was the better team but also an underperformer in the biggest moments until 2024. This one’s for all the roses and all the marbles, but if I can be honest, I’m just happy to be here.
In Montana we are taking credit for driving Coach Lake out -- UM came over for what was supposed to be a gimme for the Huskies, and won.
Anyway, "we*" lost the national championship to South Dakota State yesterday; better luck to your guys today.
* I'm an alum of Montana State, but have lived here for 15 years and root for UM in every game but one.