Jedd Fisch arrived at Washington in 2024 to take over a team that escaped the rubble of the Pac-12 Conference with mere remnants of a team that played in the 2023 College Football Playoff championship game.
Heading into Year 3 in a new conference and a rebuilt roster, Fisch believes he’s finally got a Big Ten team.
“I think the biggest change will be how we can win. We kind of needed to win like a Pac-12 team the last couple years,” Fisch said while on the “Say Who, Say Pod” podcast with Christian Caple and Danny O’Neil. “We needed to try to outscore or felt the need to win in the passing game, felt the need to win by creating turnovers on defense the best we could.
“I thought that we were built, you know, really good in the perimeter on both sides, you know, with the two corners drafted, receivers drafted, but now the difference is the team we’re putting out there is more trenches-based, is a little bit more physical, is built from the inside out. So I believe that we can win some games, even if we’re not scoring 35 points a game.”
Fisch’s expanded recruiting staff has been busy the past 2 ½ years looking for big bodies to bang against the size of the teams in the new conference. Three different Big Ten teams have won CFP titles in the past three seasons, including a 2023 Michigan team that utilized dominant offensive and defensive lines to beat Kalen DeBoer’s Huskies 34-13.
Shortly after that defeat and DeBoer’s move to Alabama, Fisch arrived as both of UW’s starting lines departed either to the NFL or other college teams through the transfer portal. After going 6-7 in 2024, UW improved to 9-4 in his second season with some increased physicality.
Size still mattered, though, as the 2025 Huskies struggled against teams built the way Fisch envisioned his Huskies would be at some point. The UW offensive line failed to establish much of a push in losses to Ohio State, Michigan, Wisconsin and Oregon. The Huskies averaged 9 points in those games, rushing for just 61 yards in a Sept. 27 home loss to then No. 1 Ohio State and 40 at Michigan on Oct. 18.
Washington averaged 93 rushing yards in the four losses. In their nine wins, the Huskies scored an average of 45 points while rushing for 198 per game — including 175 on the ground in each Big Ten win.
Though young in several key spots, size won’t be an issue for the Huskies this season. The projected offensive line of Kodi Greene, John Mills, Landen Hatchett, Champ Taulealea and Drew Azzopardi averages 6-6, 328 pounds per the roster released to the media during spring ball. Greene, a true freshman, and Mill are 18-year-olds. Taulealea played in four games last season as a true freshman. Hatchett and Azzopardi, both seniors, bring some much-needed experience.
“If you look at our team, I mean, we are young,” Fisch said. “And we’re going to just keep adding youth, and all of a sudden, next year, in 2027, our freshmen of last year will be juniors, our freshmen of this year will be sophomores, and this recruiting class will be freshmen. And now you’re talking about three years of building this thing the way we want it.”
With coaching and recruiting staff seeming complete, hallways, meeting spaces and locker rooms modernized and roots grown in Seattle, Fisch directs more focus toward the football part of the football business. Not long after Demond Williams Jr. announced — then retracted — in January his intention to enter the transfer portal, UW parted ways with offensive coordinator Jimmie Daugherty.
Though Fisch had already been calling offensive plays, he’s now spending more time directly with Williams in film sessions and during quarterback meetings.
“There needs to be a special relationship between the quarterback and the play caller,” Fisch said. “…I felt like we got to a point where that started disconnecting a little bit, and it was almost like a game of telephone. I would say something, then it would get passed to one guy, we get passed to another guy. And while there was a lot of great success, I felt like if we could cut the game of telephone off a little bit and get to a spot where when it came down to schematic decisions, when it came down to how we wanted to play the position, that we can kind of just have a direct A to B conversation. And it’s been a blast, and I think it’s enabled us to grow relationship-wise.”
The past two offseasons, Washington has focused on recruiting and retention, utilizing the transfer portal to fill apparent holes in the lineup. Though a handful of players have departed through the portal, Fisch and his staff have mostly avoided losses of core players so far. That also applies to the coaching staff. Fisch was able to retain defensive coordinator Ryan Walters, who reportedly drew interest from Tennessee before signing an extension.
Fisch brought in longtime NFL offensive coordinator Matt Cavanaugh to be a senior offensive assistant and maintained the rest of the staff. Many of UW’s current assistants followed Fisch from Arizona in 2024.
“So now we’re now really going into this new year where I’ve kept everybody, the entire defensive staff, no change, the entire special team staff, no change, the offensive staff, really no changes in what we’re trying to get done,” Fisch said.
The next step, Fisch said, is keeping all the players from recent strong recruiting classes. Washington operates on a half-share of funds from the Big Ten as part of the deal for entering the conference in 2025. Like all programs, UW attempts to find NIL opportunities for players in addition to the roughly $16 million from the revenue share pool under the House settlement. UW will once again try to coax players away from the portal door after the upcoming season.
“Our roster right now is probably half of what the CFP programs from last year paid, and for us to be able to be a CFP program annually, we’re going to have to find a way to create more dollars, generate more dollars, donate more dollars, and keep our coaches and our players,” Fisch said. “Because in my mind, schematics are great, but you got to win with the people.”
This story originally appeared at emeraldcityspectrum.com.
