Louisville Will Come Off Long List of Teams Huskies Haven't Played

The UW still hasn't faced a third of the Power 4 schools on the football field.

A Husky fan gets all dressed up for the UW-Oregon game in Eugene last month. / Skylar Lin Visuals

Washington, meet Louisville.

Your teams previously have played in basketball on a couple of occasions, the last time 20 years ago.

Yet never on the football field.

This Sun Bowl match-up coming on New Year's Eve represents a first-time meeting for these coast-to-coast opponents as the Huskies continue to go down their checklist of untapped opponents, which remains fairly lengthy.

Louisville is one of 20 FBS Power 4 football teams the UW has never faced -- or nearly 30 percent of the existing programs -- all of which is a little surprising considering the Huskies are about to wrap up their 135th season of college football.

Not only that, the UW has kept fairly busy over the past seven decades in the postseason, where teams often get lumped together for the first time in football.

This Sun Bowl is the UW's 44th postseason outing, counting last January's meeting with Michigan in Houston in the CFP national championship game, a showcase event that does not carry a bowl affiliation, and not including conference title match-ups.

Louisville hails from the 17-team Atlantic Coast Conference, which has the greatest number of top-tier football programs -- 10 -- that have eluded the Huskies in head-to-head encounters.

Besides the Cardinals, the UW hasn't faced Boston College, Clemson, Florida State, Georgia Tech, North Carolina, North Carolina State, SMU, Virginia Tech or Wake Forest.

Florida State and the Huskies were scheduled to play in Seattle in 1982, but the Seminoles canceled the trip at the last minute, The Southern school cited the exorbitant cost of traveling 3,000-plus miles cross country when it came time to book it. More likely FSU ducked the intersectional game because legendary Husky coach Don James, a former Seminoles assistant coach for that matter, had turned the UW into a national power at that time.

The 16-team Southeastern Conference is next with eight members who have not faced the Huskies in football, among them Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee and Vanderbilt.

Tennesee and the UW, however, have a home-and-home series scheduled for Knoxville in 2029 and a return match in Seattle the following season.

In the 16-team Big 12 Conference, the Huskies have only two scheduling misses left, in Central Florida and West Virginia.

As for the 18-team Big Ten Conference, even with its first-year membership, the UW has played everyone else.

So Louisville will be a bucket-list team that Jedd Fisch's Huskies can check off once they square off on Tuesday in Texas.

It should be noted the last time these schools played in basketball was in 2005, in the NCAA Tournament Sweet 16, when a Husky team led by Brandon Roy, Nate Robinson and Will Conroy lost 93-79 to Louisville in Albuquerque, New Mexico, just a 265-mile drive up the interstate from El Paso and the Sun Bowl.

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