Washington is likely to begin Year 3 of the Jedd Fisch era as a top-25 team, if current media sentiment holds. Whether preseason optimism becomes College Football Playoff reality will depend upon numerous factors that we’ll all spend the next two months parsing, but there at least appears consensus that Fisch has his best team yet at UW.
Were this, say, 2006 instead of 2026, there might be even more discussion of this season as just the beginning of a new window for CFP contention. Thanks to the recent adoption of five-in-five eligibility, the Huskies have only 11 scholarship players with no eligibility remaining beyond 2026 — the true number might actually be even smaller, depending on a medical waiver or two — and something like 62 scholarship players now with three or more college seasons still available to them, including the starting quarterback.
Only two defensive starters — linebacker Jacob Manu and edge rusher Isaiah Ward — are not guaranteed eligibility in 2027. Offensively, it’s possible that only one of the first 11 players to take the field on Sept. 6 — right tackle Drew Azzopardi — will be in their final year of eligibility (it could be two or three, depending on camp battles, but the point stands).
“We are young,” Fisch said, “and we’re going to just keep adding youth. All of a sudden, next year, 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.”
Indeed, as eager as you might be for a season that should find the Huskies at their post-DeBoer best, such accumulation of young talent should also be enough to accommodate wonder about the heights they might reach in 2027 and beyond, given another year or two of development.
And it can mean that. For the head coach, though, it also means there is a line item looming that will almost certainly dwarf whatever the Huskies invested in their current roster.
“It’s going to be expensive,” Fisch told Danny O’Neil and me on this week’s episode of Say Who, Say Pod.