SEATTLE — Jedd Fisch was straightforward about the truth of the situation he’s inherited at Washington and the unknowns of how the next month will play out.
The new head coach of the Huskies seems just as curious as everyone else about how this team and this season is all going to come together.
“I really don’t know. I really don’t know what our team is going to look like as a collective unit,” Fisch said on Tuesday.
The Huskies fall camp will get started on Wednesday with the kind of uncertainty that typically doesn’t follow a team that went 14-1, won a conference championship, won a College Football Playoff semifinal and played in the national championship game less than eight months ago.
But schools rarely have a tumultuous offseason the likes of what Washington faced, which started when Kalen DeBoer left to take the head job at Alabama less than a week after losing to Michigan in the national title game.
That led to an entirely new coaching staff for the Huskies, led by Fisch bringing nearly two dozen new coaches and staff members, most of them following him from Arizona. There are nearly 50 new scholarship players, through a mix of players that followed Fisch from Arizona and an assortment of transfers from other places.
When the Huskies take the field for their opener on Aug. 31 against Weber State, there could be 15 to 20 new starters total from both sides of the ball.
Oh, and it’s all happened as Washington is changing conferences and joining the Big Ten.
“It’s not an easy deal with 20 something transfers, 20 something freshman, 40 let’s call it Washington players from a year ago and then about another 20 or so people that were committed or went to Arizona,” Fisch said. “We’re working really hard at it, but I think we’ll get there.”
Fisch and his staff were still getting their bearings when spring practice started and even then with a roster that was still significantly fluctuating. Fisch estimated that when fall camp begins, there will be about 30 players on the field who didn’t participate in spring practice.
Trying to pull all this together — meshing what remained with what arrived — has been an exercise in team building for the coaching staff and for the players.
“That was part of what the summer was all about was making sure that these guys would be cohesive, would be connected and it doesn’t necessarily just have to be with the call and what you’re doing on the field,” offensive coordinator Brennan Carroll said. “It’s having to be close to your brother and playing for the guy next to you and being able to communicate for him on and off the field.”
Some of that responsibility has fallen to the handful of veteran players who remained after last season and are expected to have significant roles for the Huskies. Linebacker Carson Bruener noted that’s meant dinners and cookouts, and plenty of EA Sports College Football 25.
He expects to learn a lot more about his new teammates over the next month during camp.
“About a week or two into camp, I feel like that’s when it’s going to show,” Bruener said. “Us kind of coming together and going through those hardships together, it’s going to show a lot.”
