It was less than a month ago, December 13, to be exact, that the Huskies thumped Boise St to win the Bucked Up LA Bowl and finish the 2025 season on a high note. The season still had a sense of unfinished business. The Dawgs suffered an embarrassing loss against Wisconsin to keep them from a double-digit win season. Losses to Ohio State, Michigan, and Oregon showed that there was still a gap between UW and the elite of the Big 10. There was work to do going forward, including improving in the trenches, replacing Denzel Boston as the #1 WR, and developing recruits in the secondary to take over for graduates. Still, with a outstanding recruiting class incoming and stability at some of the most important positions, it looked like 2026 would be a realistic chance to close that gap to the top of the conference.
Less than a month later, all those good feelings are out the window. I live nine hours ahead of Seattle and I woke up to hundreds of Slack messages from our writers’ group. Most of them were some variation of “what in the world just happened?” Two days after Demond Williams publicly announced that he had “re-signed” with the Huskies, he announced he was entering the transfer portal. It didn’t sound possible. Not only that, but he made the announcement during the memorial service for late UW women’s soccer player Mia Hamant. And even on top of that, rumors quickly circulated that he was headed to LSU, where notoriously unscrupulous Lane Kiffin had offered him $2 million on top of the $5 million UW was already set to pay him for next season.
None of this is supposed to be possible. Even in the lawless era of NIL and the transfer portal, it’s hard to even fathom that a highly paid QB at a team with CFP aspirations who is joined at the hip to his head coach would bail on his team at this point in the calendar. Appropriately, Williams’s decision mirrors Kiffin’s. Both left very good situations for more money and prestige at LSU. The Williams case is arguably even shadier given the “rules” against tampering with players who are not in the transfer portal.
Early reports indicate that UW was as blindsided by the decision as the fans. Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports reported that UW plans to submit evidence of tampering. The school used the Big 10’s contract template to sign Williams and both the school and the conference have an incentive to enforce the binding nature of the contract. Does that mean Williams could be forced back to Montlake? It’s hard to imagine him coming back to the team after this behavior, but UW and the Big 10 will want to enforce some form of punishment, likely including a monetary settlement and other sanctions on LSU if there is evidence of tampering. Or maybe UW decides to go nuclear and take the position that Williams can play in 2026 at UW or nowhere. It would be a fascinating and painful case, but the sort of conflict that needs to get resolved for all of college football.
There’s also the complicated issue of agency representation. Both Williams and Jedd Fisch are represented by the Wasserman Football agency. It seems most likely that someone connected to LSU gave a back-channel message to someone connected to Williams about LSU’s “theoretical offer”. The school would want to maintain plausible deniability about their own agents directly contacting Williams or his agents. Still, that raises the issue of how and when it is appropriate to communicate with a player by circumventing their actual agent. And I’m sure Fisch is not thrilled that his own agency had some role in plucking the linchpin of his offense out from under his nose. Will Fisch stay with Wasserman after the agency allowed their client’s team to be gutted, very possibly in violation of tampering rules? If not, what would that mean for his own career progression?
Fisch himself is left in a very uncomfortable position. He has been connected with other, bigger jobs as long as he has been at UW. Just this off-season, we heard about him as a candidate at Michigan and Florida before he ultimately stayed at UW. My own reading of the situation is that he likely wanted to use 2026 as a platform year where the team could show improvement, make a run at the CFP (or possibly make it into the field) and catapult himself into consideration for a top-10 CFB job or an NFL job. While I have never been especially enamored of Fisch’s willingness to entertain these outside connections, his interests and fan interests are aligned here. If the Huskies do as well as possible in 2026, it could lead to a cleaner transition and allow him to go to whatever job he wants next. Losing Williams jeopardizes that goal for Fisch and the fans.
Maybe next season is still salvageable. There are plenty of good QBs available in the portal and UW obviously has a big chunk of NIL money suddenly available. Williams has his own warts. He had twice as many INTs as TDs and only 5.6 yards/attempt in UW’s losses, largely against better competition. Those are coping mechanisms, though. The two highly uncomfortable bottom lines are that there is zero roster stability in modern CFB and that UW has been relegated to being a feeder school in this scenario. All evidence suggests that LSU flaunted the few loose rules around player movement. It may have been inevitable to reach this sort of flashpoint in modern CFB, but it’s no fun to be following the team victimized by the test case for another’s bad behavior.