Here Comes the Sun: QB Match-Up Admittedly Lacks Glitter, Experience

It's a battle of the near season-long UW and Louisville back-ups.

Freshman quarterback Demond Williams Jr. signals first down at Oregon. / Skylar Lin Visuals

EL PASO, Texas -- Welcome to the Training-Wheels Bowl, where the quarterbacks, ready or not, have been made starters because their college football circumstances wouldn't permit anything else for this postseason game.

A month ago, Washington's Demond Williams Jr. and Louisville's Harrison Bailey were back-up signal-callers.

On New Year's Eve, these replacement players will be asked to step up at the 91st Sun Bowl and play as No. 1 guys because Jedd Fisch's coaching staff has turned to a dedicated youth movement in the rebuild of the Huskies (6-6) -- and the Cardinals (8-4) literally have no one else.

It's in with the new and out with the old. More accurately, it's in with the new and in with the old. Or to be frank, it's an all-encompassing spring football quarterback audition, only coming three months early.

While it might seem unfair for any bowl game to deal with a such watered-down match-up at the game's most important position, this sadly is becoming business as usual in the bowl season, leaving these postseason games on the lurch. Kickoff for this one is at 11 a.m. PST and CBS-TV will provide network coverage.

Williams and Bailey enter this postseason encounter with a combined four career starts in their college football portfolios -- just one game-opening assignment coming inside the past four seasons and only a lone victory directed by either one of them.

Two days following Thanksgiving, Williams, the Huskies' 5-foot-11, 197-pound dual-threat freshman from Chandler, Arizona, got thrown to the wolves dressed up as Ducks. He made his starting debut against Oregon in Eugene, got sacked 10 times and was baptized with a 49-21 defeat.

Yet there's no turning back now because Fisch very publicly has anointed Williams as the face of Husky football for the foreseeable future. In the process, he sat down fifth-year senior Will Rogers after the Mississippi State transfer opened the first 11 games this season and 51 overall in his college career. This move was inevitable with Fisch barely able to contain his enthusiasm over using his hand-picked offensive leader in a more prominent role.

"We''ve got him for three more years," the UW coach said of Williams. "I've never had a quarterback that long. This has been a dream of mine."

The elusive and often entertaining Williams, who appeared in all 12 prior Husky games and keeps defenses guessing at all times, has completed 56 of 73 passes for 570 yards and 4 touchdowns, and rushed 63 times for 234 yards and a score, with a long run of 43 yards against Penn State.

The Husky coaching staff turned to the speedster as a starter to have him fully ready to go when the 2025 season comes around and not have him still in transition mode. All of the kinks need to be worked out so the UW can remove that rebuilding label in the new year.

Louisville has an entirely different quarterback situation -- one more dire than hopeful, one that's borderline ridiculous for an otherwise veteran team that has enjoyed a productive season behind someone else's lead.

The Cardinals have turned the team over to the 6-foot-5, 230-pound Bailey, the last man standing after the portal cleaned out Louisville's signal-caller ranks. He's someone who has three career starts as a college quarterback when he was a freshman to finish off the COVID-scrambled 2020 season -- for Tennessee.

Former Louisville starter Tyler Shough, a senior from Chandler, Arizona, the same hometown as the UW's Williams, opted out to protect himself for the NFL draft. Redshirt freshman Pierce Clarkson, from Los Angeles and once thought to be a future Cardinals playmaker on the same order of Williams, entered the transfer portal after appearing in just three games over two seasons.

Louisville quarterback Harrison Bailey warms up ahead of his game against Austin Peay in 2024. / Clare Grant/Courier Journal / USA TODAY NETWORK

That leaves Bailey, a a one-time 5-star recruit from Marietta, Georgia, who's gone from Tennessee to UNLV to Louisville looking for opportunity that continues to elude him. He was a freshman when the Vols gave him those three prior starts, never leaving the state for any of those games.

Making his college starting debut against Florida, Bailey completed 14 of 21 passes for 111 yards and a TD in a 31-19 loss in Knoxville. Next up, he led the Vols to a 42-17 road win over Vanderbilt in Nashville by hitting on 14 of 18 passes for 207 yards and 2 scores. To close out his late-season run as the No. 1 guy, he connected on 6 of 6 passes for 85 yards and a score in a 34-13 loss to Texas A&M in Knoxville.

Demond Williams Jr. got loose on a 43-yard run against Penn State. / Skylar Lin Visuals

Coming into the Sun Bowl, Bailey might be asked to do little more than hand off the ball to keep things simple and safe. Presumably the big knock on him is a lack of mobility, with Bailey getting sacked 5, 2 and 3 times in those Vols' starting assignments.

In his favor, though, he did go up against a Washington football team once and was a dominant player -- on the schoolboy level.

In 2019, Bailey led his Marietta High School team from suburban Atlanta to a 53-14 victory over Eastside Catholic, from Seattle's suburbs, in a game held in Las Vegas. Eastside had former Husky running back Sam Adams II carrying the football and current Ohio State edge rusher JT Tuimoloau leading the defense. However, Bailey was unstoppable that day, good on 14 of 18 passes for 410 yards and 6 touchdowns.

For Louisville this season, Bailey played in four games early on and completed all 8 of his pass attempts for 63 yards, but he hasn't done anything lately. His back-up is freshman Deuce Adams from Austin, Texas, who hasn't played at all this season.

The Huskies are preparing for Louisville's offense rather than worrying about the guy running it. It's far too late for the Cardinals to make any radical changes tailored around Bailey. They're just going to have to wing it.

"I feel like they're going to be true to what they know and what they run," UW linebacker Carson Bruener said. "They're not going to have a whole new playbook just for one new person coming in."

Williams and Bailey sounds like an after-dinner drink or a circus act. Instead, this is noontime match-up in Texas that may or may not quench the thirst of every college football fan watching in person or tuning in who prefers his or her quarterbacks experienced and battled-tested, especially for a bowl game.

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