SEATTLE — Washington isn’t dodging expectancies or large targets nearest an 11-win season and the go back of a number of nationwide awards applicants. The Huskies are surroundings them.
“Our expectations are a national championship,” quarterback Michael Penix Jr. informed ESPN on Monday. “That’s what we all want, and that’s what we believe we can get. That’s just my confidence.”
Penix, who led the society in passing reasonable (357 yards according to sport) in his first season at Washington, completed 8th in Heisman Trophy vote casting in 2022. Washington’s offense rose from 114th nationally in 2021 to 2nd extreme pace, as schoolteacher Kalen DeBoer and his personnel put in a dynamic passing scheme.
Latter season, the Huskies didn’t succeed in the Percent-12 championship sport however gained their ultimate seven video games to complete Disagree. 8 nationally. A number of big name avid gamers bypassed the NFL draft to go back for 2023, together with Penix, govern huge receiver Rome Odunze and edge rushers Bralen Trice and Zion Tupuola-Fetui.
The Percent-12 hasn’t gained a countrywide championship since USC in 2004 and hasn’t had a workforce within the School Soccer Playoff since Washington in 2016.
“I know that some people are scared to go at that, like, ‘What if we don’t win a national championship? The season ends in a failure,’ but it would be wrong for us not to strive for the top,” stated Odunze, who led the Percent-12 with 1,145 receiving yards in 2022. “If we want to be our best version of ourselves, then what’s possible for us is the national championship. We’re not going to shy away from that fact, and neither are we going to sulk and moan, if that’s not exactly how it works out.
“We’re taking to paintings our ass off and journey available in the market and compete.”
Odunze and his teammates say their coaches encourage a player-driven program, which includes setting goals. He wants to help Penix become Washington’s first Heisman winner, while also trying to win the Biletnikoff Award as the nation’s top receiver.
The fourth-year player acknowledged Washington is “skipping steps,” but he and others felt they were good enough to win the Pac-12 last year, despite finishing 3-6 in 2021 and going through a coaching change.
“All of us hated the location we have been in,” Trice said. “We have been disturbed, we have been indignant, and serving to our untouched coaches in helped power that starvation that we had. Percent-12 championship, Mike getting Heisman, I’m hoping to get defensive participant of the pace and going the entire manner, CFP, we’re greater than succesful.”
Tupuola-Fetui noted that Washington’s schedule sets up better for a CFP push. After not facing Utah and USC, the teams that met for a Pac-12 title in 2022, the Huskies get both on the slate as well as Oregon and Oregon State, and Boise State and Michigan State in non-league play.
“If we pop out of that unblemished, it’s important to admire us,” said Tupuola-Fetui, a third-team AP All-America selection in 2020 who earned honorable mention All-Pac-12 honors last year. “SC’s on there, Utah’s on there, Boise Shape’s a component nonconference opponent, Michigan Shape. All of the excuses that may have been thrown at us sooner than don’t seem to be going so to, so long as we deal with our industry.”
Despite the Pac-12’s CFP drought, Tupuola-Fetui thinks the league is set up to break through this season. Five teams won 10 or more games last season, and the league returns an impressive group of quarterbacks, led by USC’s Caleb Williams, the 2022 Heisman Trophy winner, together with Penix, Utah’s Cameron Rising and Oregon’s Bo Nix.
Washington last won the Pac-12 in 2018, and the program’s last national championship came in 1991.
“We’re simply now not beating across the bush relating to the opportunity of this workforce,” Tupuola-Fetui said. “We had a quantity of men that may have entered the draft extreme pace, who determined to come back again. That’s now not familiar. Being clear about what we wish, it assists in keeping us on that trail of why we’re coming in each and every past.”
