The perception of No. 10 Washington’s showdown with No. 7 Stanford on Friday night is easy to spin.
A program that won its last national championship 25 years ago and hasn’t been to the Rose Bowl since 2000 can announce its arrival as a Pac-12 and College Football Playoff contender under third-year coach Chris Petersen. We can even throw in a montage of Mark Brunell, Steve Emtman and all those big, bad Huskies from the early 1990s to back it up.
Too bad third-year coach Chris Petersen doesn’t share that perception. He spent the offseason down-playing the expectations around the program, and one game can’t change that.
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“To me we’re doing it wrong if all of a sudden we’ve got a really good team coming in and that everybody knows and we’re saying, ‘OK now we’ve got to practice hard,’” Petersen said on the Pac-12 teleconference Tuesday. “That makes no sense.”
To make sense of Washington’s 4-0 start, Petersen said start with practice. He has a team that’s been locked in through four games. They understand the challenge that Stanford and Heisman Trophy candidate Christian McCaffrey present. The Huskies have lost seven of the last eight meetings and are 1-5 against David Shaw-coached Cardinal teams.
Yet it is a chance to show where the program stands. Petersen went 15-12 the last two seasons after going 92-12 at Boise State from 2006-13. Petersen said there is nothing to be proud of yet. He doesn’t think like that.
“It’s hard to know where this team is,” Petersen said. “It’s always a work in progress. Every week is a struggle and every week you have new challenges with all that.”
Washington has met those challenges with quarterback Jake Browning, who is following Petersen’s model as the next hyper-efficient quarterback. He’s thrown 14 TD passes in 95 pass attempts with just two interceptions. That’s all come with a 70.5 completion percentage.
Petersen won at Boise State with that same high-level quarterback play. Kellen Moore averaged 36 TD passes and seven interceptions per season from 2008-11 and had a 50-3 record as a starter. Browning, a former four-star recruit, continues to develop under Petersen.
“He really understands what we’re trying to get done, the little tweaks that we make in the game plan,” Petersen said. “There seems to be a lot less uncertainty, and he’s throwing the ball pretty well.”
If Browning can do that against the Cardinal, then the Huskies will have a chance to win. That will create a new perception. Washington will be the Pac-12 favorite, a playoff contender and maybe even picked to break a 12-game losing streak to Oregon at Autzen Stadium on Oct. 8. These two weeks are huge for Washington.
It’s part of something, and Petersen uses a word almost all coaches use these days. He’s no different than Alabama coach Nick Saban, who should’ve trademarked the phrase.
“Everybody feels their process is correct,” Petersen said. “Eventually you’re going to compete and play at a high level. Where’s this team now? We’re still evolving.”
Will they evolve into that program Don James built in the 1990s that churned out Rose Bowls and won a national title in 1991? That’s the question we want to ask, even if Petersen won’t get that near one.
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Still, there is one thing that is impressed on each week in practice. He sees it his way, and that’s working so far. There’s a way to keep those players locked in.
“They know what the standard should look like,” Petersen said. “I think they do know that.”
