Washington head football coach Jedd Fisch shares his thoughts on the biggest challenge he faces going into his first season in Seattle.
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00:00Challenge? Yeah. Building a roster would be the greatest challenge when you have
00:06to I mean we were sitting there in a spot where we had to find 21 new
00:11starters. Some from the team that we had, some from the team we came from, some
00:17from other teams, some freshmen. We had to recruit all the way through. We never
00:21necessarily knew exactly what it's gonna look like. You're battling against teams
00:26when it comes to NIL that are in the different conversations. You're trying to
00:30get players to commit when you don't really understand what the dollars are
00:34being offered to them from other programs. You're getting people taking
00:39your players for double the money that you're paying them. So there's a lot of
00:44different parts to the challenge right now, but without a doubt the number one
00:50challenge for us was building a team that can compete in the Big Ten and
00:55figuring out how we were going to do that.
00:58Coach, having coached under Jim Harbaugh, what was it like to watch him kind of reach the summit last year with Michigan to win the National Championship?
01:06Obviously at the time you had no idea you'd end up at Washington later. So can you just talk about that a little bit?
01:11Yeah, well I hope nobody takes any pictures or shows any pictures of how I
01:18was dressed for the National Championship game and holds it against me
01:23in Seattle. We were a Harbaugh guy. My wife and I are very close with
01:28Jim and Sarah. I talked to him the day of the game. I talked to him the morning
01:33after. I didn't have any expectation of coaching at Washington. I was
01:41there for year one and year two. We won 20 games. We were a bad spot away from
01:49being in the Big Ten Championship game. So I get it. I think that being
01:56with Coach Harbaugh was phenomenal. I was kind of hoping that he was going to be
02:00here for one more year so I could have the privilege of saying that I got to
02:05coach against him. I coached against him one time as an offensive coordinator. We
02:09lost 42-10, so that wasn't very good. But I'm just so happy for him and his
02:16family that they're now with the Chargers. He's going to do an amazing job.
02:20I believe wholeheartedly he's going to be one of the five guys that have won a
02:24National Championship and Super Bowl.
02:27What will you take from coaching with him now that you're coming back into the Big Ten and bringing him into your program?
02:33Well, there's a toughness and a grit that he requires his teams to have. We talk
02:40about it's all about the W at Washington. It's about working. It's about winning.
02:44And it's about Washington. Where I think when he was at Michigan it was about
02:49working and it was about winning and it was about Michigan. So, you know, hard work
02:55is what he believes in. Blue collar, work shirts, bunch of pails. And I respect that
03:02about him and that's what we're going to have our team look like.
03:07As a follow-up, you're going to be welcoming Michigan to Seattle midway through the year here.
03:14Let's talk about that match-up again. Two high-profile programs meeting again after last year's National Championship and yet a lot of difference for us.
03:24Yeah, I just think I think it's the same logos and the same universities meeting
03:29but I think the change is enormous. I don't know what their team's going to
03:32look like. They don't know what our team's going to look like. We got to play
03:35five games before it, four games before it. So, my focus right now is what's
03:40training camp going to look like on Tuesday and we know we're going to have
03:44a fantastic atmosphere. We know that the greatest setting in college football is
03:49going to be exploding on that day. We expect every camera to be there. We
03:54expect every set to be there and we're looking forward to the opportunity to
04:00host Michigan the National Champion but much more than that I don't know.