Washington dominated Boise State in the LA Bowl. Now what?

The Michigan question looms over this blowout win to clinch a nine-win season.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. — Ignore the branding, and you could have mistaken Saturday’s Bucked Up LA Bowl Hosted by Gronk for a higher-stakes affair, at least before the dozens of paying ticketholders dotted the lower sections.

SoFi Stadium is a cavernous, world-class structure. It hosted the 2023 College Football Playoff national championship. Wide concourses surround the field, beneath seats that all boast chairbacks. Opened in 2020 and home to the NFL’s Chargers and Rams, the place still smells new. The lights shine bright. There’s a canopy roof, though air flows through from openings well above either end zone. A gigantic, oval-shaped videoboard hangs over the field, visible from every crevice.

Walking the pregame sidelines past field-level luxury suites, then, gave a more prestigious vibe than might be expected for a game attended by 23,269 people and which awarded wrestling-style championship belts to the winners.

No matter. Washington coach Jedd Fisch wants his teams to approach any bowl game as if they’re playing for a title, and the Huskies seemed to embrace that mindset in this 38-10 dusting of Boise State, an encouraging way to cap what became a nine-win season.

This sort of finish — which included four touchdown passes by sophomore Demond Williams Jr., touchdown catches for freshmen Dezmen Roebuck and Raiden Vines-Bright and five interceptions by UW’s defense, four of those by players with eligibility remaining — should propel the Huskies into an offseason of greater ambition, and a commensurate degree of fan excitement.

It should be received the same way as encouraging finishes in 2015 and 2022, both seasons remembered now as The Year Before The Year, springboards toward the stuff of UW legend.

The postgame scene — Williams and linebacker Xe’ree Alexander awarded belts on stage for their MVP honors, Fisch hoisting another above his head as his players cheered — should remind of the 2022 Alamo Bowl, and the lengthy celebration those Huskies undertook in San Antonio, where they vowed to chase something bigger the following year.

And they well might.

Unless …

Well …

If Fisch’s potential candidacy for the Michigan job isn’t hanging over the UW program like that space-age scoreboard, it’s at least casting some kind of shadow. It’s also the sort of thing that’s hard to quantify. The coach’s public comments suggest he expects to be at Washington next season — he reiterated as much here on Friday — and no formal reporting has suggested Michigan and Fisch have communicated. Social-media rumors and message-board whispers are too ubiquitous to be ignored, though — the coach’s prior history with Michigan carries weight, too — and Fisch’s postgame response to a question about whether he’d like to further address his future didn’t exactly poke holes in the possibility.

“I’m fully focused on our team,” he said. “I think our team worked really hard this whole week. We gave everything we had. We played at a very high level because of that. That’s all I would say on that.”

That won’t help you sleep any better, though Fisch also spoke plenty about the future at Washington, and what it will take in the coming weeks to secure the 2026 roster. You can’t say the guy doesn’t live in the moment. If the Michigan thing is any kind of distraction, it didn’t manifest in the Huskies’ performance. Their defense suffocated the Mountain West champions, intercepting quarterback Maddux Madsen twice and his backup Max Cutforth three times. Alexander grabbed the first of those in the first quarter and returned it 29 yards. Rahshawn Clark had the next. Leroy Bryant snagged two, and even senior edge rusher Deshawn Lynch got involved, clutching a pass thrown right to him in the fourth quarter and then rumbling 57 yards before stumbling down at Boise State’s 9-yard line.

Jonah Coleman, bum knee and all, turned that takeaway into a 6-yard touchdown run, one of his 12 carries for 85 yards in his final college game. Washington’s star receiver was his typical self, too, despite playing through an ankle injury. Denzel Boston caught six passes for 126 yards and a touchdown, a 78-yard bomb from Williams on a (very) busted coverage in the second quarter.

That score put Washington ahead 10-3. A 6-yard throw to Roebuck made it 17-3 after a failed fourth-down try by Boise State, and Clark’s interception set up Williams’ 3-yard throw to Vines-Bright, which capped a three-play, 35-yard drive and put UW ahead 24-3 at halftime, a defensive slog suddenly turned into a blowout.

The Huskies were simply much better than the Broncos, a top Group of 5 program whom Washington has now defeated three consecutive times — most recently in 2019 and 2023 — by a combined total of 96 points.

If Washington is becoming the top-tier Big Ten program Fisch believes it can be in 2026, those are the sort of results you should expect against any G5 opponent, even a perennial conference champion.

“I think this group has a lot of promise to win a lot of games,” Fisch said. “We’ve talked about that as a team. We’ve talked about what it looks like, and what it can look like. … The plan is to be preparing to play next weekend.”

Next weekend, of course, is the first round of the CFP.

“Our goal, obviously, is to bring back as many players as we possibly can,” Fisch said. “I think our guys know that we’ve got a great season coming ahead of us. We’ve got a great team, and they’re led by an elite player. When you have an elite quarterback, you’ve got a great opportunity to win a lot of games.”

Indeed, Williams completed 15 of 24 passes for 215 yards and four touchdowns to take home offensive MVP honors. He was sacked four times and missed an open receiver or two, but capably guided the Huskies’ offense on a night when their defense did plenty to win the game on their own.

“About halfway through the season, I feel like there was a switch flipped in my head, just trying to turn the team into mine and continue to use my voice more,” Williams said. “Also just being a better leader on the sideline and finding ways to motivate guys between drives and continue to have us play at a high level.”

In addition to UW’s five interceptions, the Huskies also recorded three sacks and allowed only 58 yards rushing and 2.1 per attempt. Madsen (who was seen wearing a boot on the sidelines in the second half) and Cutforth combined to complete only 22 of 43 pass attempts for 253 yards, and there was only 1:18 left in the fourth quarter when the Broncos finally scored a touchdown, with UW playing several deep reserves.

When it ended, Fisch set about slapping hands and dispensing hugs, especially to seniors who played their last game. He greeted his family. He shook the hand of athletic director Pat Chun. UW’s president, Robert Jones, shouted “hey, big guy!” and the two hugged. Later, on a stage for the trophy-belt presentation, Fisch chanted along with the rest of his team: “The players, the players, the players,” something of a mantra for what Fisch wants to be a player-centric operation.

Senior cornerback Tacario Davis didn’t play due to a hamstring injury, but linebacker Deven Bryant, apparently headed to the transfer portal, was the only UW player to opt out. Quentin Moore got to catch the longest pass of his career, a 32-yard touchdown from Williams in the third quarter, which the senior tight end celebrated with a Gronk spike. (Tragically, it was penalized.) Zach Durfee had a sack in his final college game.

Not long after, Fisch sat between Alexander and Williams, an LA Bowl backdrop posted behind them in a multipurpose room off the field-level concourse. He concluded his opening statement: “Our team had a great week of preparation, and have had a really good November and December. Proud of those guys, and excited about what the future entails.”

After the press conference ended, Fisch climbed aboard a golf cart. Alexander sat next to him; Williams sat up front, next to the driver.

Doug Hendrickson, Fisch’s agent, sat in the back next to a colleague. As a bowl staffer shuttled the group back toward Washington’s locker room, Hendrickson pulled his cell phone from his pocket and pressed it to his ear.

Will he field a call from Michigan at some point?

Has he already?

Fisch is giving his assistant coaches the next couple weeks off, he said. The team won’t convene again until the first week of January, for the start of winter quarter. Until then, “we’re working very hard, to make sure we keep staff together, team together. We’ll meet and Zoom and have a lot of calls regarding trying to get everything ready to go for (January).

“It’s going to look like probably a lot of work — fundraising and talking to donors, and trying to put our best team together that we possibly can. We understand the landscape that we’re in. We understand that it’s our responsibility to make sure that our players are compensated, our coaches are compensated.

“We’re going to work very hard to try to get that done, because the most important thing you can do is have continuity. And not having continuity is not good.”

He said it.

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