Is Jedd Fisch OK with UW? Define OK in today’s college football

Attempting to offer a summary opinion about the current state of big-time college football is not easy. Every time a pause for reflection seems to appear, it is overtaken by another scandal, outrage, criminality, silliness or obfuscation that needs to be included. It’s a little like wading waist deep at the ocean beach: You think the next wave won’t be as strong as the one that just pulled you under.

So I’m taking a chance here. Now that Washington has completed its pageantry for 2025 with participation in the Bucked Up LA Bowl Hosted by Gronk, I am at least comfortable enough to assert that no other bowl-game name will be more absurd — this year (there will be no such bowl next year, after five robust years of meaninglessness). Where I’m not sufficiently comfortable, along with anyone wearing purple, is whether Jedd Fisch will remain as Huskies’ head coach after two whole years at Montlake.

Despite leading the Huskies Saturday to a 38-10 rout of Boise State before the hundreds at SoFi Stadium, concluding the season 9-4, Fisch did not go out of his way to quash speculation about his potential hire at Michigan, where the Big House holds 106,000 seats and only slightly fewer scandals. As long as the Wolverines have a vacancy at the top of their program, Fisch’s name makes the top-five speculative list of candidates by every media outlet.

Asked post-game about his immediate coaching future, he said, “I’m fully focused on our team. I think our team worked really hard all week. We gave everything we had. We played at a very high level because of that. That’s all I would say on that.”

A trite, traditional dodge. It’s plausible, yet none of those words included, “I’m not going to Michigan or anywhere else.” He has said nothing that offers proof to members of the current roster, or UW’s heralded recruiting class of 2026, that he does not have a foot out the door.

As we Monty Python disciples like to say, wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

There’s no getting around the fact that among his many coaching stops, Fisch, 49, has never stayed more than four years anywhere. He did hang out from 2016 to 2018 at Michigan, where he was passing game coordinator and quarterbacks coach under then-head coach Jim Harbaugh. He’s a known quantity in Ann Arbor.

But Fisch also signed in 2023 a seven-year deal with Washington worth $54 million, so he’s not shopping at the Montlake Dollar Store for Christmas. And a move to Michigan now would be stepping into quicksand. Harbaugh’s successor, former U-M assistant Sherrone Moore, was fired and arrested last week after an affair with an athletics department staffer that devolved into charges of trespassing and stalking at the staffer’s apartment. Prosecutors allege Moore, a married father of three, threatened to kill himself in her presence. And this was after a school-ordered investigation a year earlier into rumors of the affair but turned up nothing.

The sordid drama follows by a year the sign-stealing scandal among football coaching staffers that inspired Harbaugh to decamp to the NFL and the Los Angeles Chargers, instead of facing NCAA charges and punishment that would soil a commendable run at his alma mater. Numerous other incidents suggest a department operating as incompetently as Robert Kennedy Jr. runs his show in the Trump Cabinet.

So it seems likely that Fisch would take a pass on the mayhem in Ann Arbor. At least for a year.

Speaking of a year, that’s all Washington State got out of football coach Jimmy Rogers, who left two weeks ago for a presumably better job at Iowa State. Bad timing, that, since WSU was without a permanent athletics director and only recently hired a new president, Elisabeth Cantwell, who came from Utah State and began April 1.

WSU and Oregon State are the only legacy members from the Pac-12 Conference, reconfigured for the 2026 season with six new teams. The original iteration was decimated by conference realignment when the wealthier schools, in ravenous pursuit of larger media rights fees to fund their professional athletes, took off for the wealthier Big Ten, Southeastern, Atlantic Coast and Big 12 conferences.

The Cougars hired Kirby Moore, 35, for the first head coaching job of his career. A native of Prosser who played at Boise State and was offensive coordinator at Missouri the past three seasons, he is the brother of Kellen Moore, in his first year as head coach of the New Orleans Saints.

Kirby may be a great fit for a football enterprise in ceaseless tumult. Or he might get the Cougars to 6-6 and flee to a better job. as Rogers did. So the new WSU AD will get a shot at the hire of the next football coach of the moment.

So it goes.

Coaches have always gotten hired and fired. So too, the ADs. Players have transferred before. Bowl games have come and gone. Conferences have often realigned. What’s the difference now?

Everything everywhere is happening at once, to no good end.

Even the Notre Dame program, considered the industry’s premier national brand, as much as told everyone else to drop dead. The Irish were the 13th team when the College Football Playoffs selection committee handed out the allotted 12 berths for this year’s field. Indignant as only an arrogant fiefdom can be when slighted, Irish AD Pete Bevacqua blistered the Atlantic Coast Conference, with which ND is aligned in other sports, for failure to support its case for inclusion.

“We were mystified by the actions of the conference to attack their biggest business partner in football and a member of their conference in 24 of our other sports,” he said. “They have certainly done permanent damage to the relationship between the conference and Notre Dame.”

The Irish were so contemptuous that they withdrew from the rest of the NCAA bowl season, drawing rebukes from around the industry, but no sanction. As with most of the business apart from the games, there are no meaningful rules. No framework, no floor, no ceiling, and little but transactions. I hesitate to use a hackneyed phrase such as a loss of moral compass, particularly with college sports having been without for so long, but never has the industry been so nakedly about money, and helpless to do much about it.

The most intense infected blister developed at Mississippi, where coach Lane Kiffin created in six years a powerhouse Rebels program, going 55-19, including 11-1 this year that was rewarded with the No. 6 seed in the CFP field. He then barrel-rolled the Ole Miss constituency by accepting an offer from SEC rival, and powerhouse, Louisiana State that starts at $14 million. He did it in the oily way that Kiffin always prefers — a drawn-out, highly public dalliance that played for days across social media platforms in which he cast himself as vulnerable searcher for wisdom to soothe his highly conflicted soul.

Bleah.

For more than 100 years, college sports kept to its fidelity to amateurism. Schools, coaches and networks gained riches from a flawed system that many critics said cheated the players and set up the industry for a fall. Now that it has fallen, the history, customs, traditions and rules that enchanted fans and made it different from pro sports have less value. It is a distressed industry, now destined to be a target for investment by private equity firms.

The claim is that the Bucked Up Bowl was named after an energy-drink sponsor. I have other thoughts.