Inside The Huskies

Taking Toll of Two Washington-Michigan Football Games

These match-ups had different winners doing the same thing.

Dan Raley

Kam Fabiculanan makes a fourth-quarter interception against Michigan.
Kam Fabiculanan makes a fourth-quarter interception against Michigan. / Skylar Lin Visuals

Playing for a CFP national championship nine months earlier, Michigan and Washington were superior football teams full of NFL-bound players who entered the fourth quarter in a 20-13 game and the Wolverines imposed their will in a big way and closed out a 34-13 victory.

On Saturday, the Huskies did the exactly the same thing to their friends from the Midwest on a smaller stage, if you can say that about a 72,132 sellout and NBC national TV audience. With everything on the line and staring at a 17-14 deficit entering the final 15 minutes, the UW came up with the game-changing plays that eluded them in Texas and won 27-17.

Football is like that -- some days it humbles you and on others it allows you to feel invincible.

In that Houston finale, Husky safety Kam Fabiculanan was remembered best as that guy who had his helmet ripped off and was photographed with his face contorted and his hair flying in every which direction.

Kam Fabiculanan after having his helmet ripped off in the CFP title game.
Kam Fabiculanan after having his helmet ripped off in the CFP title game. / Skylar Lin Visuals

At Husky Stadium, this smooth and veteran player also known as Kam Fab made a perfect break on a Jack Tuttle pass and came up with a diving interception that basically sewed up the replay between these teams that keep running into each other.

"[You] put the things in the past that are in the past and just focus on the now," Fabiculanan said, downplaying the suggestion that this was a possible payback win. "And we did that and we got the job done."

People basically wrote off this UW team this season because half of the roster and nearly all of the starters turned over, leaving a skeleton crew.

Yet when Jedd Fisch took over as coach, and players such as Carson Bruener verified this, they talked about the winning attitude that was left behind for the Huskies to build off of and you couldn't summarily dismiss that.

These remaining players such as Fabiculanan, Bruener and edge rusher Voi Tunuufi, who forced a fumble that led to the game-winning points against Michigan, weren't going to suddenly forget how to make big plays and win just because a lot of guys left town.

In fact, quarterback Michael Penix Jr., sensing that something positive might happen, took a break from the NFL and came back for the big moment. Others departed Huskies got on a group chat to encourage the remaining guys to get the job done this time.

"They told us the significance of disappointing [everyone], especially from last year's team," Tunuufi said of the title game performance. "I was there personally."

Football works in mysterious ways sometimes. A lot of fans forever will blame Kalen DeBoer for the CFP title game outcome, for not having his team as prepared as before, suggesting that what happened was because DeBoer already was in opening discussions to take the Alabama job.

Whether or not any of that was true, it seems more than a little ironic that on the day the Huskies were taking down mighty Michigan, DeBoer's top-ranked Alabama team was upended 40-35 by heavy underdog Vanderbilt, which hadn't beaten the Crimson Tide in 40 years, a most shocking development. Football is funny like that.

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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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