Takeaways from Washington's first Big Ten road tour

Packed stadiums, big money, distinct playing styles ... and Primanti Bros.

Washington’s inaugural Big Ten football season did not spare the Huskies from the logistical realities of their new conference.

UW played five Big Ten road games in 2024. One of them was at Oregon, a familiar, nearby location. The other four had the Huskies traveling to Piscataway, N.J., for a Friday-night game; to Iowa City, Iowa, for a 9 a.m. PT kickoff; to Bloomington, Ind., for another 9 a.m. PT kickoff; and to State College, Penn., for a game that kicked off at 8 p.m. ET and necessitated a nearly two-hour bus ride to Harrisburg afterward for the return flight — all before a Friday home game against UCLA the following week.

Oh, and the combined record of UW’s five Big Ten road opponents? That would be 52-17, counting the postseason, for a group that included three College Football Playoff participants.

The Huskies knew they were signing up for some version of this, of course, when president Ana Mari Cauce decided in August 2023 to leave the Pac-12 behind — the long travel, the body-clock challenges, the possibility of regularly facing elite competition in hostile environments.

After traveling to each of those games myself, I’ve been pondering lessons learned from UW’s first tour through Big Ten country. Three distinct themes emerged. The fact they all begin with the letter “i” is either coincidence or contrivance. I’ll let you decide.

Interest

UW coach Jedd Fisch said at one point that he figured Washington would play its 2024 season in front of more combined human beings than ever before, and he was right.

The Huskies’ five road games — at Rutgers, Iowa, Indiana, Penn State and Oregon — each were played before sellout crowds, something I can’t imagine any other UW team has experienced. Average official attendance at those five games was 69,249, slightly outpacing UW’s average home crowd of 68,865.

The school’s previous record for total attendance (regular season only) was 815,307 in 12 games in 2002, when the Huskies began the season with a trip to Michigan and averaged 71,435 fans at their seven home games.

Even with a lesser home attendance figure, UW still set a school record by playing in front of 817,002 fans in its 12-game 2024 season. A scheduling quirk actually prevented that figure from being higher: instead of playing the standard seven home games, UW had only six games at Husky Stadium and one neutral-site game, the Apple Cup at Lumen Field, which drew only 57,567. Of course, the Huskies also benefited from effectively swapping out a road game at Washington State, where Martin Stadium holds only 32,952, for a trip to a Big Ten venue (Indiana’s crowd of 53,082 was a season-low for UW on the road). And playing in front of 110,233 people at Penn State didn’t hurt the numbers, either.

More impressive than the raw numbers, though, is that each of the Huskies’ first five Big Ten road opponents filled their stadiums to capacity (or at least announced a capacity crowd). In fact, eight Big Ten teams announced home attendance figures for the entire 2024 season that were greater than or equal to 100 percent of stadium capacity (it should be noted that one of them was Northwestern, which played in a temporary, 17,470-seat stadium). UW’s percentage of capacity was ninth-highest in the league, at 98.26.

The Huskies faced three of those top eight — Oregon, Penn State and Iowa — and also caught Rutgers for a sold-out blackout game, and unbeaten, resurgent Indiana for a “Red Out” preceded by a College GameDay appearance. The 54,079 fans who watched Rutgers beat UW represented the second-largest crowd in stadium history. The Indiana game was the first of four sellouts for the Hoosiers in a record-setting year for attendance. There is a perfect-storm quality to some of this — Rutgers had circled UW as its marquee home game, and Indiana was in the midst of a historic come-up, and those schools won’t always pack their stadiums — but it was remarkable all the same.

This won’t be a repeat occurrence in 2025, with Maryland and UCLA both on the road schedule, but 2026 might at least come close, as UW is scheduled to visit Michigan State, Nebraska, Oregon, Purdue and USC. Nebraska and Oregon are a given, and Michigan State regularly sells out, though numbers were down in 2024. USC might not create the most deafening atmosphere, but the Trojans did sell out multiple conference games in 2024, and even Purdue, while finishing 1-11, averaged more fans per home game than in any season since 2005 (and filled its stadium to 97.47 percent of capacity).

If you’re wondering, Oregon, Colorado, Utah and Oregon State were the only former Pac-12 schools to announce average attendance of 100 percent or more of stadium capacity in 2024.

Investment

It goes without saying for Penn State and Oregon, but when even Indiana is throwing $8 million per year at its football coach, you know you’re in different territory.

Iowa just redid its locker room and pays its coach $7 million per year. Indiana paid a huge buyout to fire Tom Allen, recently committed big money to Cignetti, and opened a new football operations facility in 2019 and a football-only weight room last year. Nobody thinks of Rutgers as a premier Big Ten athletics program, yet the Scarlet Knights are invested enough in athletics that they continue to run a massive deficit (and university leadership hasn’t seemed all that concerned about it).

When Washington visited Michigan State last season, the walk from the parking garage to the football stadium served as a tour of an impressive array of facilities, from the Breslin Center to an ice-hockey arena to a field-hockey stadium to a full-length football practice field … for the marching band.

It’s no secret that Big Ten schools make big money and invest it in athletics, and Washington could add its own projects to this list, too, along with the fact that it pays Fisch nearly $8 mil/year, can spend big for assistant coaches and plans to max out its revenue-share cap under the pending House settlement. But it was instructive to get an up-close look at what the Huskies are up against.

Identity

At Rutgers, a Sopranos-themed intro video plays before the team runs onto the field. Fans can pregame on the Rutgers Boardwalk, replete with a ferris wheel and petting zoo and all manner of food trucks. The stadium soundtrack includes local flavor like Bruce Springsteen and Frankie Valli and Jon Bon Jovi. There is no confusing the fact that when you are at SHI Stadium, you are in New Jersey.

A game at Iowa’s Kinnick Stadium evokes a similar sense of place, with its “America Needs Farmers” initiative and unique touches like the tight sidelines and “Hawkeye Wave.” Beaver Stadium proclaims the home team as “The Pennsylvania State University” in big, blue letters, and it felt like just about every one of the state’s residents showed up for this year’s “White Out” game against the Huskies. Indiana might not have much of a football identity, but new coach Curt Cignetti sure seems to, and wasn’t afraid to let it show this year.

There’s something to be said for embracing who you are, and that was among my biggest takeaways from UW’s first tour through (part of) the Big Ten. Playing style follows from identity, too. It’s no secret that Big Ten teams like to run the ball and aren’t so great at throwing it, and boy, did UW’s schedule bear that out. Will the Huskies ever see another slate of such sub-par quarterback play? Or is it the new normal, for as long as UW aligns with this particular group of schools?

Generally speaking, the “Big Ten style” isn’t so out of line with how some of UW’s best teams have played throughout the years; the Huskies’ halcyon eras have typically been marked by stellar defense and star tailbacks, save for what Michael Penix Jr. et al accomplished in 2023. The game has changed, of course, but maybe not so much on a Friday night in Piscataway, or a Saturday morning in Bloomington.

As Fisch said in October: “We have to be able to run the ball. That’s how we’re building Washington football for the years to come — good run game, great defense, take shots down the field on offense and be explosive and get wide receivers touchdowns. That’s what we believe in. That’s who we are. So we need to run the football if we’re going to be successful.”

Ingestion

A bonus category for you, because this particular road schedule also was conducive for knocking out new regional dining fare.

At Rutgers, I stopped by RU Hungry?, home of the original “fat sandwich,” and ordered a chopped cheese (it was fine).

In Indianapolis — I didn’t love the hotel rates in Bloomington — I ordered pizza from Giordano’s (it was good).

In Pittsburgh, the night before trekking to State College, I tried a famous Primanti Bros. sandwich (it was really good).

In Iowa City and Eugene, I just ate pizza.

I’m not sitting in the drive-thru line at the In-N-Out Burger in Keizer.

— Christian Caple, On Montlake