Last week was not a good week for a couple of ex-Husky head football coaches. Kalen DeBoer and Steve Sarkisian each lost unexpectedly Saturday, shaking them from their high-profile perches. Nor was it a good week for their current successor at Montlake. Jedd Fisch’s version of the Washington Huskies isn’t ranked, and didn’t even play Saturday.
Sarkisian (2009-13 at UW, now at Texas) held the nation’s No. 1 poll spot until losing to No. 4 Georgia 30-15, a game that featured a trash-throwing episode by Longhorns fans that drew a $250,000 fine from the Southeastern Conference. DeBoer (2022-23 at UW, now at Alabama), followed up an earlier loss to Vanderbilt — a team that has been accused numerous times of using actual students to play football — with a 24-17 defeat to No. 11 Tennessee in Knoxville. Only flags, not trash, were thrown: The Crimson Tide was guilty of 15 penalties for 115 yards.
Mock as you will the misery of coaches who used Washington as a steppingstone. A healthy snicker is often good for the soul. But the matter of Fisch is more current and local, and received a national airing that was only indirectly related to a loss.
The Monday after Washington was splattered 40-16 at Iowa and dropped to 4-3 (2-2 in the Big Ten Conference), Fisch re-directed the post-mortem conversation to the bigger picture of the national chaos created by largely unregulated payments from private sources to NCAA athletes, called NIL and now in its fourth year. Fisch did not lament the payments to players, but did offer dismay by implying that Washington is not competitive financially in the top tier.
“The new world order of college football will allow us to be able to spend what other programs are spending,” Fisch said. “When you have that opportunity, then it’s going to be much more of a level playing field than it is right now. We all saw what the Ohio State-Oregon game looked like, and that was a battle of two $20 million rosters. I think we’re going to see more battles of comparable compensated rosters, and that’ll make it really cool to see what football looks like.”
By elevating the guess of NIL money going to the Buckeyes and Ducks players to at least conventional wisdom, he set publicly a floor by which he appears to hold his bosses and UW boosters to account. The implication, of course, is that if they fall short, he will join the list of ex-Washington coaches. Which is not really cool.
“We never want to be at a disadvantage,” Fisch said of the financial competition with the biggest programs, then he slyly backed off the implication. “The best part of all of my conversations with (athletics director Pat Chun) and (chief operating officer Erin O’Connell) have been (them saying), ‘We’re not going to be at a disadvantage.’ They’re fully on board that the University of Washington is not going to be at a disadvantage, and we’re going to understand the necessary things we have to do to stay at the top of the conference.”
The “necessary things” are really one thing — straight cash. You know, like the rumored $1.6 million that went to Michael Penix Jr. to keep the Huskies’ All-America quarterback around for the 2023 season instead of submitting to the NFL draft. The boosters responded, as they did for most of the $63 million to build a men’s basketball practice facility, and another several million to build a top-shop television broadcast studio on campus following the collapse of the Pac-12 Conference and its largely failed network.
For Fisch to follow a non-competitive conference loss with the suggestion that UW’s financial position is somehow complicit is outlandish. Does that condition help explain how UW lost the Apple Cup to a Washington State program that was orphaned after the Pac-12’s demise? And what about this week’s game? The Huskies travel to Bloomington to play at 9 a.m. Saturday the undefeated and 13th-ranked Indiana Hoosiers. Does Fisch think that he can’t pull together an NIL package from the land of Microsoft, Amazon and Costco that will help compete against a place whose largest employer is the school itself?
To give him some slack, Fisch is operating under a belief that a settlement of litigation against the NCAA announced last week will, theoretically in 2025, begin to re-direct private money to flow through athletics departments, thereby creating a chance for conferences to set up something akin to the salary caps of other pro sports.
In a word: No. That goal is subject to numerous debates, more litigation and a re-organization of the business of football and TV networks that is several years away, at best.
Until then, Fisch would be well-served to confine his post-defeat explanations to what he could have done better and leave the big picture of NCAA chaos to economists, lawyers and accountants in the off-season. I’m still waiting for a good explanation for the last play of the Apple Cup.
I think I understand what Fisch is commenting upon. He is looking at the future of college sports, and I believe he sees that downstream parity in programs is going to be dictated by cash incentives. The NFL has parity because of a draft system coupled with contractual obligations. Colleges and universities? Just money at this point in time.
The Husky program is and will continue to be at an intercollegiate, multi-sport disadvantage after agreeing to inclusion in the Big 10 that was in part, predicated by a media deal that paid them much less than than their Big 10 peers. I’d love to read the dissertation that will eventually be generated at the UW’s Foster School of Business by some individual that will analyze that Big 10 deal.
What is really missing here is a good old fashioned private investment capital infusion.