He walked into Montlake months ago, a surprising splash hire with a boring and bland mantra.
How good do you want to be?
How good do you want your life to be? How good do you want to be for your family, for society and finally, for your team?
"We're not building football players," Chris Petersen said. "We're building men."
If that's boring, college football should be full of coaches who don't move the juice meter in a media conference — but absolutely redline it on the field.
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This is the same guy who won 92 of 104 games at Boise State, building a program so impressive the rest of the heavy — hitting BCS schools couldn't ignore it and grew to fear it.
So when Washington became the first to do what many believed no one could ever do — get Petersen to leave Boise State — the focus shifted from the Boise State mantra of bigger isn't always better, to big fish, big pond.
Big deal.
The level has changed, but the idea hasn't: Petersen is building and winning with OKGs — our kinda guys.
"An our kinda guy?" star defensive tackle Danny Shelton said. "Easy, a guy who knows what's important."
Yep, it's corny and clichéd, and you know what else it is? Damn successful.
And vastly underrated.
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We're four games into Petersen's change of a lifetime and heading into Washington's Pac-12 opener this weekend against Stanford, and the Huskies are unbeaten just like all of those Boise State teams of the past. The way they're doing it, though, doesn't look anything like Petersen's loveable BCS busters.
Washington leads the nation in sacks (19) and turnover margin (plus-8). The Huskies lead the nation in fewest turnovers (1) and their quarterbacks have yet to throw an interception.
In case that wasn't good enough, kicker Cameron Van Winkle hasn't missed in six field-goal tries.
"When you play smart and fast and aggressive," linebacker John Timu said, "the world changes out there."
Timu was speaking about what happens on the field; he might as well have been talking about what transpires off it.
Because if Washington can upset a team it has beaten once in the past six tries; if the Huskies can prove that their 4-0 start wasn't simply a byproduct of a cake nonconference schedule, the narrative changes and this team no longer is in transition with the novelty of watching its coach adjust to life in the Power 5.
It becomes, fair or not, more about Petersen and less about our kinda guys. It becomes more about a coach who dominated in the WAC and Mountain West; who beat Oklahoma in the greatest upset of the BCS era and won two BCS bowls now trying to do the same thing at Washington.
Anyone who knows Petersen knows that's the last thing he wants, because of the attention it brings to him (he'd rather be holed up in his office breaking down game tape) — and the attention it takes away from Miles and Shelton and Timu and tailback Lavon Coleman, and every other Washington player who could get this team to 5-0 for the first time since 1992.
The guys who have bought in to a new coach and a new philosophy and the idea of how good do you want to be.
How physical do you want to be? How strong at the point of attack do you want to be, and how diligent do you want to be by taking care of every small detail that will, without a doubt, be the difference between winning and losing in every facet of your life?
"Football should be important to our guys," Petersen said. "But those guys who have it all figured out away from the field are the guys that are most successful on the field. There's a direct correlation there that can't be ignored."
The big fish still swims in that little pond. It's a pond the size of Lake Washington now.