Inside The Huskies

Bruener Makes Individual Honors Breakthrough for Huskies

The UW senior appears on a list of the nation's top 50 linebackers.

Dan Raley

Carson Bruener pulls down Michigan tight end Colston Loveland in the CFP championship game.
Carson Bruener pulls down Michigan tight end Colston Loveland in the CFP championship game. / Thomas Shea/USA TODAY Sports

Carson Bruener has started just one game over the past 28 outings at linebacker for the University of Washington football team, but people have never lost sight of him.

Last season, the conference coaches voted Bruener as an All-Pac-12 honorable-mention selection even while he opened only the Oregon State game in Corvallis as an injury fill-in for Alphonzo Tuputala and otherwise played steady minutes as a reserve.

This weekend, the senior legacy player from Woodinville, Washington -- the son of former UW and NFL tight end Mark Bruener -- was singled out as the nation's 30th best linebacker on a list compiled by Big Game Boomer, which sounds more like a nickname Bruener should adopt.

The 6-foot-2, 226-pound Bruener, who has 202 career tackles in 39 Husky games, finds himself in the Big Ten, a linebacker conference, to finish up his time in Montlake.

By ranking No. 30 nationally, he's considered the ninth-best linebacker in his new his new league, standing in line behind Iowa's Jay Higgins (5), Oregon's Jeffrey Bassa (8), Michigan's Jaishawn (11), USC's Easton Arnold-Mascarenas (13), Iowa's Nick Jackson (18), Rutgers' Tyreem Powell (23), Northwestern's Xander Mueller (26) and Maryland's Ruben Hyppolite II (29).

Outside of new Husky running back and former Arizona rusher Jonah Coleman turning up on various top transfer lists, Bruener is the first UW player to receive any individual attention of really any kind heading into the coming season.

"I would say Carson Bruener has done a great of leading the pack," new UW coach Jedd Fisch said during spring football. "I think his leadership is clear. He's a good athlete who makes a lot of plays. He's physical."

The general outside consensus seems to be the Huskies, with just two starters returning, are bereft of the high-level talent that so clearly filled their roster in 2023 on the way to the CFP national championship game.

Bruener, however, runs counter to that argument and likely he has a number of teammates who will step up and show people there's plenty of football talent in Montlake.

For the latest UW football and basketball news, go to si.com/college/washington

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Dan Raley
DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.

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