BROWNING NEARING THE END OF A 'PRETTY COOL' LEGACY AT UW

By Rich Myhre

By Washington Huskies

October 18^th, 2018

As every football fan knows, good quarterbacks are also good leaders. And University of Washington quarterback Jake Browning was a good leader right from the start of his college career.

Actually, he began showing leadership long before his first UW game.

BROWNING NEARING THE END OF A 'PRETTY COOL' LEGACY AT UW

Browning arrived in Seattle early in 2015, having graduated at the semester of his senior year from Folsom (Calif.) High School. Weeks later, and on the day other UW-bound high school players were signing their national letters-of-intent, Browning was already enrolled at Washington.

Wanting to reach out to the other incoming freshmen, Browning used his cell phone “to message everybody in our recruiting class and say, ‘Hey, here’s my number.’ I was already (on campus), so whenever they came to visit I wanted to make sure I knew they were going to be in town, stuff like that.

“I just kind of said, ‘Hey, I’m excited to be on the same team. Let’s get to work.’”

In recent years, that 2015 UW recruiting class – which included running back Myles Gaskin; offensive linemen Trey Adams, Jared Hilbers and Henry Roberts; receivers Andre Baccellia, Quinton Pounds and Chico McClatcher; defensive backs Jordan Miller and Austin Joyner; linebackers Ben Burr-Kirven, Tevis Bartlett and D.J. Beavers; and outside linebacker Benning Potoa’e – has helped lift the Huskies to national prominence.

Though all have contributed to the program’s success, no one has been more visible or played a more significant role than Browning, the team’s fourth-year starting QB.

What drew him to Washington, Browning said, was his faith in the direction of Husky football, as determined by head coach Chris Petersen and his staff of assistants. Despite having multiple scholarship offers, “I believed in Coach Pete and all the coaches,” Browning said. “I thought they had a really good coaching staff, and that’s why I came here.”

Though the Huskies had barely been above .500 in four of the previous five seasons, “I didn’t come here because I thought where Washington was (at the time) was how it was always going to be,” he said. “I thought there was potential to be really special.”

Even during his freshman season, when the youthful Huskies began 4-6 and needed to win their last two games to become bowl eligible, Browning sensed the program was poised for a turnabout.

“We were going through a losing streak, but nobody was quitting or hanging it up,” he recalled. “Everybody kept fighting and kept battling. And then in that offseason I thought we put together something pretty special. We kind of set a different standard around here.”

What followed was a remarkable 2016 season, when Washington finished with an 11-1 regular-season record, beat Colorado in the Pacific-12 Championship game, and advanced to the College Football Playoff. A year later, the Huskies went 10-3 and played in the Fiesta Bowl.

“I think it’s pretty cool to accomplish some of the things we have,” Browning said. “I think we all came here (thinking) it had the potential to be at a really high level, and so far it’s been everything I wanted and more. But now we obviously want to take the next step.”

As a four-year starter, Browning has been around long enough to put his name in the UW record book many times. Indeed, he should depart with most of the school’s career passing records.

He began the season as the all-time passing touchdowns leader and his total had reached 87 through six games in 2018. Against BYU he added the career passing yards record, and his total is 10,855 yards through seven games. Against Oregon, he also passed Cody Pickett for most career completions to claim yet another record.

In addition, Browning has various other UW records to his name. One of the most impressive is the career total offense record, which he surpassed early in the season. Through seven games his total is 11,025 yards, and he is on his way to a mark that should remain untouched for some time.

Records, Browning said, are “something for much later. You’ll probably think about different records when you’re older, especially when you’re thinking back about some of the people you played with and some of the cooler experiences I’ve been able to experience here with different people that’ve gone on to do some cool things (in the NFL).”

When asked for one word that best describes Browning, UW offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Bush Hamdan replied: “I’ll give you two – resilient and consistent. I think he’s been resilient throughout his career here. He’s had some ups, downs and all arounds, but through all that he’s just been extremely consistent from his first day to his last day here.”

With the end of his college career in sight, Browning is willing to talk about legacies. Winning a national championship would be the best one, of course, but he also points to the beginning of a new era of Husky football. In this, Browning has a chance to do what Warren Moon did back in the late 1970s, which was early in the UW career of then-head coach Don James. In Moon’s senior season of 1977 (James’s third as Washington head coach), the Huskies returned to national prominence with a Rose Bowl victory over Michigan.

Doing something like Moon did “would be pretty cool,” Browning said. “It’d be cool to be thought of as one of the original Coach Pete guys that helped Washington get to where it is.”

In the years to come, he added, “I think (the program) will get better and better. But kind of being the original guy here, I think some of the quarterbacks coming in won’t necessarily have to go through some of the growing pains that I had to experience as a true freshman. I don’t think we’ll ever be at that point as a program for a long time.