Welcome to the 2026 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 2026.
Hidden Returning Starters
Preseason magazines love to look at returning starters as a metric for how much returning experience a team has. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Most positions have somewhere between 65-90% of their snaps come from one player so having that starter come back is essential to keeping up continuity.
Washington’s defense in particular though doesn’t quite fit that model as cleanly. The Huskies have 7 defenders coming back that played between 150-400 snaps last season and started more than one but fewer than half of the games. Those are very important pieces that probably don’t count as a returning starter in most calculations.
LB Jacob Manu started every game he played in but only played in 4 games to maintain his redshirt after returning from a torn ACL. Freshman LB Zaydrius Rainey-Sale returned midseason from a torn ACL suffered in high school and played heavily thereafter. LB Buddah Al-Uqdah was a game one starter before suffering a season-ending knee injury in the non-con and will hope to come back midseason like the other two did last year.
Freshman DBs Rahshawn Clark, Rylon Dillard-Allen, and Rahshawn Clark all started multiple games and showed by season’s end that all were Big Ten caliber players. Edge rusher Isaiah Ward missed time with injury last season but was a heavy rotation player when healthy. And all this doesn’t take into account fellow ED Russell Davis II who has only been fully healthy for one game through two seasons but was dominant in that contest versus USC.
Put it all together and the Huskies may only return 4 of their top 11 defenders in terms of snaps played but they bring back 7 of the next 10 and many of those players had either overtaken or come close to overtaking some of the ones above them on that list. That leads to a defense that is much more experienced than a simple returning starters number would suggest.
Punt, Punt, Boom
I’ll admit to being among the Husky fans that weren’t especially sad to see Jack McCallister depart in the transfer portal after the 2024 season. Washington hardly needed a punter during the Michael Penix Jr. era and when they suddenly did, McCallister didn’t seem up for the job. His net punt yards of 34.6 were among the worst in the Big Ten and it seemed like it would be easy to find an upgrade. Nope.
Washington tried to go the Aussie punter ™ route but their chosen option chose to go back home after the first week of spring practice. They brought in Oregon transfer Luke Dunne late and he did manage to best McCallister’s average net yards total…by 0.21 yards. The Huskies once again had one of the worst punt units in the conference and it particularly cost them in the Wisconsin game. The Badgers seemingly had no shot of going further than about 25 yards on any given drive on offense but the Dawgs kept getting pinned inside their own 20 and couldn’t punt it any further than midfield.
That should get fixed this year. Enter Hunter Green from San Diego State who averaged 6 more net yards per punt than Dunne with an extra quarter-second of hangtime. Green had nearly half of his punts pin opponents inside the 20 compared to 26% for Dunne and had a long of 68 last year compared to a long of 50. If Green has similar numbers this year then you’re looking at a hidden ~25 yards per game that won’t show up in traditional offense/defense analysis.
The Fountain of Youth
Experience is reliable in college football. If a player is good for three straight years on the field then you know what you’re probably going to get in year four. But going young can yield a high ceiling, low floor approach. There are plenty of players on this Husky roster who are in either their 1st or 2nd years of college football who haven’t come close to reaching their potential yet and there are reasonable reasons to think they might.
The defense has several of those players I brought up in the first section with breakout seasons likely coming from underclassman DBs Dylan Robinson, Rahshawn Clark, and Rylon Dillard-Allen. Linebacker Zaydrius Rainey-Sale was the top-rated player in the state in the class of 2025 and is oozing with potential. True freshmen Ramzak Fruean and Derek Colman-Brusa are four-stars that the coaching staff has gushed about since they showed up on campus. DCB appears likely to start on the interior for Washington and become the first true freshman D-line player to play 250+ snaps in the last decade (the only two to hit 200+ were Voi Tunuufi and Laiatu Latu).
Washington’s offensive line has embraced the youth movement with guards John Mills and Champ Taulealea positioned to start in their second year of college football with Mills in particular flashing all-conference potential this year. True freshman five-star Kodi Greene is likely to man the left tackle spot. They’ll all be blocking for underclassmen skill players like Dezmen Roebuck, Quaid Carr, and Jordan Clay who have earned plenty of hype from the coaching staff.
Maybe several of these players fall flat. But the average pundit who isn’t glued into practice reports might assume some of these freshmen and sophomores are starting because it’s a position of weakness, not because the Huskies have recruited guys ready to contribute at a high level from day one. I don’t think that’s how the coaching staff views it and if it turns out it’s Fisch and co that are right then this is a team that seems poised to go way over 7.5 wins.
