Inside The Huskies

Set Your Alarms: Huskies Draw Another Early One at Indiana

Jedd Fisch's team will kick off at the same time it did in Iowa.

Dan Raley

Iowa’s Brendan Sullivan (1) is tackled by Washington’s Jordan Shaw (3) with Huskies Drew Fowler (54) and Voi Tunuufi (52) giving chase.
Iowa’s Brendan Sullivan (1) is tackled by Washington’s Jordan Shaw (3) with Huskies Drew Fowler (54) and Voi Tunuufi (52) giving chase. / Julia Hansen/Iowa City Press-Citizen / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

Here we go again.

If the University of Washington football team and its fan base felt an early Saturday morning kickoff at Iowa was a hardship, in both playing and viewing, the Huskies' reward is to face Indiana in the exact same time slot.

On Monday, the Big Ten announced the unbeaten and 16th-ranked Hoosiers (6-0 overall, 3-0 Big Ten) on Oct. 26 will host the UW (4-3, 2-1) for a 9 a.m. PST kickoff, which is noon on site in Bloomington, Indiana.

The UW will need a much better wake-up call to rouse them after sleep-walking through a 40-16 defeat at Iowa this past weekend.

Maybe the Huskies should consult with former quarterback Michael Penix Jr., who played four seasons for Indiana before coming to Montlake, for a solution.

The Huskies will play at Indiana for just the second time after going in as the defending Rose Bowl winner and a 15-point favorite and losing to a Lee Corso-coached team 14-7 in 1978.

Similar to this one coming up, those teams had to deal with a morning kickoff, though at 11:30 a.m. PST. Even with a couple extra hours of sleep, the Huskies never got football acclimated. They outgained the Hoosiers 402-238 in total offense yardage and had a 23-12 edge in first downs, but came home a loser.

Corso, better known to today's college football fans as the ESPN Game Day panelist who picks games by pulling on mascot heads, chose to wear down the Huskies that day.

"The only way to beat a team like Washington is with the kicking game, defense and killing the clock," he shared afterward.

Husky coach Jedd Fisch went to great lengths to prepare for the UW-Iowa game by changing practices times to the early morning and flying his team to the Midwest a day earlier than usual. Still, he felt his guys wore down in the second half of its 24-point loss.

He quoted numbers of college teams losing 18 of 19 cross country road games going into last weekend, with published reports showing it was 9 of 10 Big Ten teams falling short.

"We've got to look at that," Fisch said in the postgame in Iowa city. "We've got to continue to figure out a way, that's not changing. We've got to go across three time zones. We're on the East Coast two other times this year. We've got Indiana and we've got Penn State. It's our job to figure that out."

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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