Inside The Huskies

Huskies Maintain Indiana Connection, Offer Hoosiers DL

Philip Blidi spent one season with the Big Ten team after three at Texas Tech.

Dan Raley

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The University of Washington football program apparently isn't quite done with its Indiana connection, making an offer on Tuesday to former Hoosiers starting defensive tackle Philip Blidi in the transfer portal.

The 6-foot-3, 295-pound Blidi, down to a final college season, opened 11 of 12 games and finished with 30 tackles, including 4 tackles for loss, for a 3-9 Indiana team this past fall.

Prior to that, he played three seasons at Texas Tech, where he and Ja'Lynn Polk were freshmen teammates in 2020 before Polk transferred to the UW.

Blidi is a fairly worldly character. He's the son of Liberian parents, has nearly a dozen siblings — too many to keep track of, he wisecracks — was raised early on in Trenton, New Jersey, and spent his high school years in Portales, New Mexico.   

“It was a loud house,” he said of his childhood home to the Indianapolis Star. “We broke things, we played football in the house.”

Bildi similarly has been married since 2021 to Emma, a nursing student he met at Texas Tech and they have two young children, a boy and a girl. They became close after contracting COVID-19 at the same time and hung out together while in recovery. 

Family is important to him, which he made clear when reporting to the Hoosiers with one child in tow and another on the way.

“Every time I got out on that field, it wasn’t just I’m playing for my parents, my brothers, my sisters,” Blidi told the Star. “This is my daughter. This is my first child, and I want to give her a better life, and I want to take care of her, and I want to give her the best future she can have.”

While his lone season went well personally at Indiana, he's back in the transfer portal because Tom Allen and his coaching staff were fired when it ended.

Allen, of course, employed former UW coach Kalen DeBoer as his offensive coordinator at one time, ex-Husky tight-ends coach Nick Sheridan likewise as another Hoosiers offensive coordinator and DeBoer's UW co-defensive coordinator William Inge as his linebackers coach, plus he had a promising Hoosiers quarterback for four years in Michael Penix Jr.

DeBoer, now at Alabama, has Sheridan serving as the Crimson Tide co-offensive coordinator while Inge will coach this coming season at Tennessee as a linebackers coach. Penix is preparing for the NFL draft after finishing as the Heisman Trophy runner-up while with the UW.

The Huskies also have Jordan Shaw, a former Indiana cornerback and two-game starter, on the roster, with the defensive back transferring first to Arizona and then following new coach Jedd Fisch to the UW.

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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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