Down to maybe its only realistic chance of becoming bowl eligible, the University of Washington football team will travel to Michigan State this weekend in need of a sixth victory to secure a postseason game.
If the UW (5-4 overall, 2-4 Big Ten) doesn’t beat the Spartans (3-6, 1-5), it will need to upset defending national champion Indiana at home or rival Oregon on the road, two daunting scenarios as it stands.
So it’s win one on Saturday afternoon in East Lansing in order to play in December, with most of the college football experts suggesting the Huskies will land in one of two second-tier bowl games if they can make that happen.
The early intel is the Sun Bowl or the Independence Bowl, places the UW have visited previously, including the former game fairly recently.
ESPN, Sports Illustrated and The Athletic each have predicted the Huskies will play on New Year’s Eve in El Paso, Texas, for the second time in three years.
In 2024, the UW lost to Louisville 35-34 in a Sun Bowl in which then-freshman quarterback Demond Williams Jr. threw for 374 yards and 4 touchdowns and ran for a fifth as the Huskies finished 6-7.
This time, The Athletic is pushing for a UW-North Carolina match-up, which would have Jedd Fisch matching coaching wits with Bill Belichick in a first-time meeting between the schools on the football field.
However, ESPN and Sports Illustrated each like a Husky-Clemson match-up, which would be another first-time pairing.
The UW has appeared in the Sun Bowl five times and lost the last four. The Huskies also beat Texas 14-7 im 1979 and came up short to Alabama 28-6 in 1986, to Iowa 38-18 in 1995 and to Purdue 34-24 in 2002 besides facing Louisville.
Should a Texas trip not be in the foreseeable postseason plans, the UW could make a second appearance in four decades in the Independence Bowl in Shreveport, Louisiana, that state’s third largest city.
CBS Sports has predicted a UW-Central Florida game in Shreveport on Dec. 22, while a second ESPN forecast has the Huskies playing there against West Virginia. Both of these pairings would be first-time meetings, as well.
In 1987, a Don James-coached UW team beat Tulane 24-12 at the Independence Bowl in a driving rain storm in a football stadium normally used for high school games.
The bowl organizers did their best to host Seattle media members, inviting them to a restaurant meal in which fried alligator was served and out for a local golf round that was disrupted by a lightning storm.
Yet the Huskies have to get there first and there are no guarantees. While Michigan State currently is tied for last place in the Big Ten standings with Maryland (3-6, 1-5) and Rutgers (2-7, 1-5), the Spartans are coming off a rousing 15-6 victory over rival Michigan last weekend in Ann Arbor.
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