Welcome to the 2025 edition of the 30-Day Countdown!!!
Every year we get ready for the new Husky football season by coming out with a daily article that examines the approaching games through a certain lens. Sometimes they’re serious, sometimes they’re not. But we generally try to get you, the reader, involved with a poll to get a sense for where Husky nation’s head is at on that topic.
To start us off, I’m looking at some of the factors that likely aren’t being discussed by the national media in their
early previews of Washington. Today we’ll focus on the positives and some of the reasons why the Huskies may surprise in 2025.
Defensive Coordinator Switch
It’s easy to focus on the players when looking at what changes have been made from season-to-season but defensive coordinator tends to get overlooked. Last year the Huskies had a defensive coordinator who had 0 college football experience in any capacity coming in with Steve Belichick. He had plenty of NFL pedigree of course and I thought he did a pretty good job all things considered but he wasn’t up for the Broyles award and didn’t immediately turn Washington’s defense into a powerhouse.
The hire of Ryan Walters to replace Belichick after he joined his dad at UNC got largely overlooked by the national media. That’s likely because Walters was coming off a disastrous first tenure as a head coach at Purdue. But being a head coach and an assistant are vastly different skillsets as one James Lake could potentially tell you.
Washington finished 29th in defensive FEI last year which is opponent and pace-adjusted. That’s basically the floor for a Walters defense. If you throw out the Covid-shortened 2020 season then he has never finished worse than 32nd in that metric when serving as the defensive coordinator. And on the high end he managed to finish 3rd with Illinois in 2022 which helped him to get that Purdue HC job. That ties Washington’s best ever finish in DFEI (started in 2007) from back in 2015 as part of a two-year stay in the top five.
I don’t expect Washington to have a top five defense in year one under Walters. But if he can manage to improve the Huskies by 10 spots just through improved coaching then it will go a long way towards an extra win or two.
Home Field Advantage
Last year was a perfect storm of home/road splits in order to go undefeated in Husky Stadium and winless away from it. The Huskies ended up playing five top 25 teams away from home last year when you include their bowl game versus just two at home. Six of UW’s eight toughest games were all away from home last year.
That won’t be the case this season. You can never perfectly predict who is going to be good before the season. Most people thought the game at Indiana would be easy rather than another contest against a CFP participant. But this year things are tilted towards playing the toughest games in Husky Stadium. All three upcoming UW opponents that won 9+ games last year have to come to Seattle.
Among those projected to be better, it is true that the Huskies have to travel to Michigan to face what could be a top-ten team this time around. But their likely next toughest road game (at Wisconsin) is currently 37th in preseason SP+. Last year that would’ve ended up being UW’s 5th toughest regular season game away from home.
Having a home-loaded schedule can be a double-edged sword. It provides a higher ceiling and floor than a road-loaded schedule which tends to be more consistent. When your tough games are at home it gives you the chance at a few upsets that might not be possible away from home. But it also means that losing those home games combined with any underperformance on the road could tank your season.
If the Huskies manage to go 6-1 at home this season or even 5-2 while beating the teams they’re better than on the road then this is a team that will enter the final week of the season in CFP contention. And oh yeah, I guess this is where I should mention that Washington has the second longest current home win streak in the country at 20 games.
Especially Special Teams
There are legitimate reasons why people don’t pay as much attention to special teams when thinking about how good a team can be. They are on the field for a small portion of the game, they don’t result in as many direct points, and they’re less consistent from year to year. The Huskies had a five-year run of top 40 special teams play under Chris Petersen but since then it has boomeranged back and forth between: 103rd, 15th, 124th, 73rd, 57th, 10th, to 110th last year. That’s an average change of 70 spots each year or more than half of FBS. (The offense averaged a change of 39 spots and the defense 25).
Washington finished 110th in special teams FEI last year while facing the 9th toughest slate of opponent special teams. The relative incompetence wasn’t greater anywhere else in the country. There was no greater epitome of the importance of this phase of the game than the narrow loss at Rutgers in which the Huskies missed three field goals and also blocked a field goal but had it overturned on a penalty for a player celebrating on the field...and Rutgers scored a TD on the next play.
Per bcftoys.com the Huskies were 130th in unadjusted special teams efficiency, 105th in field goal efficiency, 129th in punt efficiency, and 131st in kickoff efficiency. Some of those numbers would have naturally gotten better just through natural regression to the mean but Coach Fisch also got proactive.
Last year the Huskies went with TE Coach Jordan Paopao pulling double duty to also be the special teams coordinator. This year they hired Chris Petrilli to be in that role and also have a quality control coach specifically focused on special teams. Changes were made on the player side with Oregon transfer Luke Dunne coming to be the punter and Illinois transfer Ethan Moczulski coming in to likely handle kickoffs. That combined with Grady Gross seemingly emerging from a midseason case of the yips that coincided with that Rutgers game means the kicking game should improve in every facet.
More from uwdawgpound.com:
- Husky Coaches Are Busy On The Recruiting Trail
- Friday Dots: Will the Huskies find snaps for all their running backs?
- Husky Softball pulls off legendary comeback to finish statement sweep at Utah
- Dots: Comeback Kids
- Friday Dots: Who are the Huskies’ top draft prospects for 2018?
- Dots: Ross inks Rookie deal with Bengals
- Dots: Madden-ing
