Inside The Huskies

Huskies Don't Have California Game This Season -- Unless It's In a Bowl

Only once has UW football not visited the Golden State in past 100 years.

Dan Raley

Husky quarterback Jake Locker holds the Holiday Bowl championship trophy following a 19-7 win over the Nebraska Cornhuskers at the 2010 Holiday Bowl.
Husky quarterback Jake Locker holds the Holiday Bowl championship trophy following a 19-7 win over the Nebraska Cornhuskers at the 2010 Holiday Bowl. / Christopher Hanewinckel-USA TODAY Sports

As it stands on a regular-season schedule custom made for Big Ten membership rather than the Pac-12, the University of Washington won't play a football game in California for just the second time in 100 years.

No Los Angeles, Berkeley or Palo Alto road trips.

USC and UCLA both are coming to Seattle to play the Huskies in the coming months, while California and Stanford, now part of the Atlantic Coast Conference, seemingly are playing everywhere except in the Northwest.

The only other time a Golden State blackout happened for the Huskies over the past century was in 2020 when the COVID pandemic wiped out a UW-Cal game that would have opened the season and a UW-USC matchup in the Pac-12 championship game at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

This nearly happened in 1992, too, when the Huskies hosted UCLA, Cal and Stanford in Montlake and didn't play UCLA that season, but they ended up qualifying for the Rose Bowl and lost to Michigan 38-31 in Pasadena.

No California exposure presents a hardship for a UW program that currently counts 47 players from that state on its roster and usually can promise those recruits they can regularly compete in front of family and friends.

However, the Huskies still could end up with a football game in Southern California before the year is out should veteran sportswriter Brett McMurphy's latest bowl projections for Action Network hold up.

McMurphy has Washington and Notre Dame meeting in the Holiday Bowl, which will be played at San Diego State's new Snapdragon Stadium on a date not yet announced.

The Huskies and Fighting Irish have never played in the college football postseason before. The UW, in fact, has not beaten Notre Dame anywhere, losing all eight previous meetings held between 1948 and 2009, most by lopsided scores.

As for the Holiday Bowl, the Huskies are 1-3 in San Diego, winning their most recent appearance in 2010 by beating Nebraska 19-7 and earlier losing to Colorado 33-21 in 1996, to Kansas State 24-20 in 1999 and to Texas 47-43 in 2001.

The UW has played fairly regularly in the state of California going all the way back to 1915, when Gil Dobie's Huskies first agreed to a home-and-away series with Cal in that season alone, winning 72-0 in the Bay Area and 13-7 in Seattle.

The Huskies' California absences are few since then. Besides the COVID interruption four years ago, the UW didn't make it to California in 1920, playing only one road game that season at Oregon, or in 1924, when the Huskies' ventured out only for road trips to Oregon and the College of Puget Sound (now UPS) in Tacoma.

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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