UW Huskies vow to eliminate unnecessary noise ahead of Big Ten test at Michigan State
SEATTLE – Which will Washington choose: the signal or the noise?
In framing UW’s looming road test at Michigan State, Husky coaches point their players to a football metaphor. Imagine your offense takes the field inside Spartan Stadium on Saturday, surrounded on all sides by nearly 75,000 screaming fans. Your quarterback, Michael Penix Jr., attempts to communicate the call.
Will you pay attention to the play, or let outside distractions fog your focus?
“If there’s a lot of chatter going around, that’s the noise,” UW associate head coach and wide receivers coach JaMarcus Shephard said. “If you’re involved in the chatter, you’re not paying attention to the signal itself that really starts everything off.
“That, to me, is where our guys are at right now. We’re not worried about all the chatter, all the white noise that might be going around at various programs around the country – even when people are trying to inject it into our program. We want to be that signal that everybody hears, and we want it to be loud, and we want it to be right now. So our guys are not worried about that stuff at all, legitimately. They know on Saturday, these (Michigan State) boys are coming hard. These boys are coming, and they’re expecting to win a football game.”
The situation around coach Mel Tucker is the noise. The fourth-year Spartans coach was suspended without pay Sunday, less than a day after sexual harassment allegations against Tucker became public. Assistant coach Harlon Barnett was appointed interim coach, with former head coach Mark Dantonio also returning as associate head coach. While Tucker’s suspension is tied to an ongoing investigation, it’s increasingly likely the 51-year-old has coached his last game at Michigan State.
But that continued chaos in East Lansing, Michigan, shouldn’t make the Spartans (2-0) a less viable threat. After all, UW fell 45-38 at Arizona State following the firing of Herm Edwards last fall, delivering interim coach Shaun Aguano’s first ASU win.
It’s been a noisy week around Michigan State.
But come Saturday, as Shephard put it, the Huskies hope to be the signal.
“(The Tucker situation) might come up,” said UW coach Kalen DeBoer. “But I’m really feeling that you don’t make a big deal of it. Because again, it’s going to be about the 100-plus guys they have on their team that want to do something special. They’re going to be playing at home, trying to go 3-0 in an environment that is hostile. It’s going to be an awesome atmosphere.
“A lot of coaches on that staff have been there many years. The coordinators have been there all four (years) that staff’s been there. I think there will obviously be some distractions that they have, but we can’t let those distractions be ours.”
Besides, the Huskies have been there before.
In 2021, UW played its final three games under interim coach Bob Gregory following the in-season firing of Jimmy Lake. Junior wide receiver Rome Oduze said “whenever a team goes through adversity like that, especially with a guy that recruited all of them, they’re going to come out with some fire, some passion. They want to show people they’re still strong. They can still play ball and come out here and compete.
“It’s definitely a different mindset that you have when all that stuff goes down. You don’t want to be that story of, ‘Oh, their coach left, so they’re not going to be very good.’ You want to be that team that stepped up and won without the head coach. I know that’s the mindset they’re going to come out with – that fire, that passion. So we’re getting ready for it, for sure.”
Oh, and lingering Big Ten implications – that’s the noise. It’s natural for fans to watch this game and consider it a Big Ten barometer – before UW, Oregon, USC and UCLA all enter the conference in 2024. Though UW has made just one prior visit to Michigan State, it’ll soon be a far more frequent occurrence.
But – to repeat the refrain – come Saturday, be the signal.
“It’ll be good to be out there and see what their fans are like,” sophomore offensive lineman Geirean Hatchett said. “We were at Michigan a couple years ago, but that was just a one-off. So now this year will help lead us into next year. But we still have the Pac-12 to worry about and winning the last Pac-12 championship.”
“This is about this season, this team,” DeBoer said. “That (Big Ten talk) really doesn’t apply for our team. Now, we’ll make some notes on the travel logistics as a coaching staff and things like that might pertain to a year or two down the road. But for this team and this weekend, that doesn’t have an impact.”
You know what might? The actual noise.
On Saturday, No. 8 Washington (2-0) will play its first road game this fall inside Spartan Stadium, a setting with nearly 75,000 seats checkered in green and white. UW dropped its first two road games a year ago.
To reach Pac-12 title and College Football Playoff plateaus, it can’t afford similar slips.
“We know there’s going to be a lot of people there,” sophomore wide receiver Ja’Lynn Polk said. “We understand the fans are going to be right there and it’s going to be loud and rumbling. But we know the type of team we have and the type of players that we have, and we’re going to go out there and compete and be elite players like we are.”
That’s what Saturday’s game drills down to: the players and the plays. It’s about protecting Penix and attempting to establish a complementary running game on the road. It’s about containing Michigan State transfer running back Nate Carter and pressuring inexperienced quarterback Noah Kim into costly mistakes. It’s about winning the turnover battle and quieting a Big Ten crowd.
Everything else amounts to unnecessary noise.
Or, to use another Shephard staple …
“Excuses are tools of incompetence used to build monuments of nothingness. Therefore, those who use them usually amount to nothing,” the Husky assistant said Wednesday, before summarizing.
“So … no excuses.”