Washington dominated Boise State in the LA Bowl. Now what?
The Michigan question looms over this blowout win to clinch a nine-win season.
(Programming note: Due to travel logistics, I’m tentatively planning to push this week’s Day After column to Monday.)
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 …