Craig Has The Scout - Washington 2025

Coming Up

Who: Washington Huskies

When: 2:30 pm – Saturday, October 25, 2025

Where: Husky Stadium, Seattle, Washington

How: BTN

Opponent Primer:

Head Coach: Jedd Fisch

Jedd Fisch’s LinkedIn profile is lengthy. It could be summarized as Jedd Fisch, Mercenary Coach to the Stars and Frequent Flier Miles Enthusiast. Fisch has spent the last two decades becoming the human embodiment of the coaching carousel. He was a GA Spurrier at Florida picking up offensive schemes and a love for visors. He followed that with a defensive quality control job with the expansion Texans under Dom Capers, and then four years in Baltimore as an offensive assistant where he became a made man in the Harbaugh crime family. Fisch wasn’t climbing the ladder as much as collecting famous names like Pokémon cards. Gotta work for ‘em all.

The next ten years were a blur of one-year leases and long waits in the DMV getting a new license. There was the year in Denver with Mike Shanahan, Minnesota as OC with Tim Brewster, QB coach in Seattle with Pete Carroll, OC at Miami for Al Golden, Jacksonville as OC for Gus Bradley, QB coach for Harbaugh at Michigan, UCLA as OC under Jim Mora, the Rams under Sean McVay, and then the Patriots in the Belichick hospice years. If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like if a football coach tried to speed date the coaching profession, it’s this. He parlayed that last year in New England into landing the head job at Arizona. He took the Wildcats from 1–11 in year one to a 10–3 team in year three, which is a miracle. But a miracle he immediately cashed in to become the Head Coach at Washington in 2024, a move that proves the only thing Jedd Fisch loves more than football is bubble wrap. Fisch is a schematic tinkerer, a mobile quarterback enthusiast, and a man who treats job titles like temporary tattoos. He’s not in Seattle to build a statue, he’s using his Husky tenure as a very public audition for his next, inevitable stop (Hello Florida!).

Offensive Style: Pro-style Spread.

The Washington offense is a high-volume, quick-strike passing game designed to stress the entire field. The scheme favors the Air Raid family of concepts, utilizing RPOs. Washington plays with a slow tempo with an emphasis on precision, staying ahead of the chains, and the quarterback making quick, accurate reads. While the previous regime's explosive downfield shots were iconic, Fisch's version is often more about sustained efficiency and spreading the ball around to maximize yardage after the catch. Fisch likes to move his QB around and relies on a diverse set of short-to-intermediate throws like slants, mesh, and shallow crosses, to manufacture yards and stress defenses.

In the off-season Fisch brought in Jimmie Dougherty as his OC. Dougherty is an Edwardsville grad and former Missouri QB. After a year at Illinois Wesleyan, he landed on Jim Harbaugh’s staff at San Diego hopping from the wide receivers to tight ends to QBs. He stayed at San Diego when Harbaugh left and took over as OC. He then joined Steve Sarkisian at Washington. From there, he then jumped from San Jose State (OC), to Michigan (Harbaugh analyst), to UCLA with Jim Mora and Chip Kelly coaching WRs, before hooking back up with Fisch at Arizona. He has been one of Jedd Fisch's trusted lieutenants since their time at Michigan and took over at OC when Brennan Carroll was lured by his dad back to the NFL. Dougherty’s résumé is a tapestry of different schemes, with slightly fewer moves than Fisch. His promotion to OC proves that in this business, sometimes the best asset is just being the capable guy already in your boss’s phones.

Defensive Style: 5-1-5 with an emphasis blitzes.

Ryan Walters is the new DC of the Huskies and someone Illinois is very familiar with. Walters is the former Colorado safety who was a student assistant under Dan Hawkins. He then moved to Arizona first as a GA and then DBs coach under Mike Stoops (and Tim Kish for those who know). Once Mike was fired at Arizona, he took the lifeline Bob provided as a GA at Oklahoma, before heading to North Texas as the CBs coach under Dan McCarney. He caught the eye of the TCU OC there, and Justin Fuente took him on his first Memphis staff where he started working under Barry Odom. Odom made him DC at Missouri before moving to Illinois. It was in Champaign where he truly found The One Thing That Works, migrating to the 5-1-5 man scheme from the 4-2-5 of Odom and in the process built the Illini into a statistical defensive juggernaut in 2022 that led to a Broyles Award finalist nod and the keys to the Purdue program. That head coaching gig turned out to be less of a job and more of an extended, poorly-rated vacation, ending abruptly after two seasons with a 5-19 record. He’s back in his element now, having packed his bags for Seattle and leaving behind some entirely unfinished business. Specifically, the matter of the massive, unbought-out-of-the-contract house he was building for himself in West Lafayette. It appears Walters is less interested in completing the home-building process in the Midwest than he is in completing the process getting back to being a defensive coordinator at an elite program, and really, who can blame him for prioritizing the latter over an escrow account in Indiana?

The Huskies defense Walters have made a hard, aggressive pivot to a philosophy defined by secondary athleticism and manufactured pressure, a scheme that looks to terrorize quarterbacks with exotic looks rather than simply overpowering them. Walters’s calling card continues to be the heavy use of Cover One man coverage, a high-risk, high-reward approach that asks cornerbacks to live on an island while a roaming free safety acts as a center-fielder for deep shots. Up front, the base may feature a hybrid 5-1-5 alignment, sometimes appearing as a three-man front with two stand-up edge rushers, often blitzing from the second level to create confusion and force the offense into bad decisions on early downs. The entire operation is engineered to generate a massive number of takeaways and third-down stops, which is exactly what happens when you have guys who can play elite man-to-man defense. The results are either heaven or hell; there's no purgatory.

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