If Healthy and Able, Huskies to Play USC in Friday's Pac-12 Title Game

The UW football team will hustle to get healthy and head to Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to decide the league championship.

Dan Raley | Dec 13, 2020

Fingers crossed, the University of Washington football team and USC will meet Friday night in the 10th Pac-12 championship game on the Trojans' home field at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, with kickoff at 5 p.m.

The announcement came during the fourth quarter of USC's thrilling last-second 43-38 victory over UCLA at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, keeping the 15th-ranked Trojans (5-0) unbeaten.

The title match-up was made public by the conference on a day in which the Huskies (3-1) sat at home in Seattle, unable to play at Oregon, because of positive COVID-19 test results.

If either team is unable to play because of the virus, the Huskies will be replaced in the title game by Oregon (3-2) and 21st-ranked Colorado (4-1) will step in for USC, according to news accounts.

UW coach Jimmy Lake said earlier in the week he doubted his team would be healthy enough to play next week if it couldn't face the Ducks.

Here's betting he's changed his mind about that.

"In a football season that has thrown unprecedented challenges and adversity at our football teams and student-athletes, USC and Washington have performed at the highest levels and earned their places in the 2020 Pac-12 football championship game as the Pac-12 South and North Champions," league commissioner Larry Scott said in a prepared statement.

The Huskies, missing multiple players against Stanford in a 31-26 loss the weekend before and unable to meet minimum personnel-level requirements against Oregon and play on Saturday, will need to get healthy in a hurry.

In the last meeting between these schools, the UW defeated the Trojans 28-14 a year ago at Husky Stadium.

The two aren't scheduled to face each other during the 2021 season simply because of the league's opponent rotation.

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Published Dec 13, 2020

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.