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Earlier this week, I visited Washington to work on a Jake Browning feature that’ll run in the Pac-12 Title Game pre-game show (FOX, 8 p.m. ET). In addition, I chatted with Huskies coach Chris Petersen as he prepared for Colorado. The following is some of what we discussed.
Q: Has it been harder to kind of tune out the outside noise as things have gotten bigger? Now you guys are in the middle of the Playoff hunt, and Jake is a Heisman candidate. How challenging is that for you on a day-to-day basis?
Petersen: We’ve addressed it from the start because you guys (the media) got lucky, trying to predict all those things, and everybody jumped on that bandwagon. That's flat out the truth because you don't know how these guys are going to develop and improve and stay focused. They did all of those really hard things. So that was just a lot of guess work.
Sometimes you (the media) guess right. But we talked about it from the start and one of the things that we really thought, the key to our success, was to not hear all of that whether it's negative or positive. That has nothing to do with our success. Our success has to do with how we work and take care of each other and stay focused, and so right from the start we've talked about it. We address things all the time that we think are important to our success and that was one of them.
Q: People have seen you in a lot of big games back at Boise. You won a lot of those games. How is it different here than when you were there?
Petersen: As a coach it's not different at all. My first game I ever coached at UC Davis as the JV football coach, I think there was 50 people in the stands, and it felt exactly the same to me. You just have pride in your work and you care, and it doesn't really matter if there's 70,000 or 50 people to me you're so invested, and that's just how I've always thought.
Q: With this group, I know you had a lot of kids who bought in early and you had to get the old guys who you inherited. Any part of this invigorate you since you'd been at Boise for a long time, and you get here now?
Petersen: Well, that's why I came here. I mean, you know you have your way. You have your process and it is an intense process. After a while, you need something to do, [to] reinvent. You know you're always tweaking and changing a little bit, but the core of who you are and how you do things, that can't change if you have success. That's what you believe in, that's what got you there, but somehow you have to figure out new ways. I'd been in Boise for a really long time.
This was kind of my way to maybe reinvent myself a little bit, doing the same things in a different spot from ground zero with new people, you know, new players, some administration and coach or two, but really I wouldn't have been able to do this without the awesome people that I was able to bring with me the coaches. It's just too big for one guy. That's why we have success is because of all of those other coaches, hands down.
Q: You mentioned a bit ago about the goal and what they play for. What was the goal coming into the year for this team?
Petersen: To win a conference championship. I mean I think that should be everybody's goal. I mean that's really all you have a chance to control. Then there are a lot of things that factor in where you go from there, but we set those, and then we get off that really quickly. I mean it's just all about like playing and competing and practicing to the standards, and the standard is the best you've done, and if you can do that day after day and then try to standard, I mean that's when magic happens, and so that's what we've really paid attention to for a while around here.
Q: You’ve never been a guy who's worried about the outside talk -- you won't worry about politicking for the Playoff Committee or any of that stuff? Is that because you know that you're disciplined enough in your head to know that's not going to do me any good, or it's like a karma thing, you've seen other guys kind of get distracted? They bring it up, and it kind of comes back to bite them? How are you able to focus?
Petersen: I have confidence that the committee will do the right thing. That's what I have confidence in, and I've seen it way back when. If we take care of business, then this thing will play out real positive for Washington. I have complete confidence in that.
