Inside The Huskies

UW Will Face White-Out Conditions At Penn State

The Big Ten team will try to distract the Huskies with its game-day color selection.

Dan Raley

Penn State and Iowa take the field to play in a White Out football game at Beaver Stadium Saturday, Sept. 23, 2023/
Penn State and Iowa take the field to play in a White Out football game at Beaver Stadium Saturday, Sept. 23, 2023/ / Dan Rainville / USA TODAY NETWORK

The University of Washington football team might as well scale Mount Rainier on an inclement day to prepare for its Nov. 9 game at Penn State, which its Big Ten hosts have determined will carry a "White Out" theme.

If nothing else, the Huskies should consider hiring some Sherpa guides to navigate their ascent and descent in and out University Park, Pennsylvania, which sits in the middle of the state, 135 miles east of Pittsburgh and 190 miles west of Philadelphia.

On Monday, Penn State revealed its game themes for the coming football season and the Huskies will enter Beaver Stadium, the second-largest in the country with a 106,572 capacity, and encounter nearly everyone wearing all-white sports attire, with wardrobe choices including a White Out T-shirt supplied by NIKE.

Penn State, which has traditional blue and white school colors, is widely known for its basic all-white helmets and uniform, which offer zero frills, logos, etc.

The Huskies and the Nittany Lions have faced each other three times over the past century, once in Seattle in 1921 and twice at neutral sites for postseason games. -- in the 1983 Aloha Bowl and the 2017 Fiesta Bowl.

For those bowl games, the UW dressed in white jerseys wearing either gold or purple pants and Penn State, in blue jerseys each time, won 13-10 in Honolulu and 35-28 in Glendale, Arizona.

This November road trip to Penn State should be an eye-opener for Jedd Fisch's UW football team. Beaver Stadium trails only Michigan Stadium nationally for capacity, with just 1,129 fewer seats than the Wolverines.

The Huskies can only hope this game goes better than their last visit to Michigan, where they lost 31-10 in 2021 before a full house.

At least Fisch's guys will be wearing purple jerseys for this football outing. The UW's track record in all-white football uniforms, as the CFP championship outcome against Michigan bore out with a 34-13 loss, hasn't been very successful over the past decade.

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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