Following their bye week, Washington Huskies fans on the West Coast will have to wake up bright and early to watch their team. Coach Jedd Fisch’s team is traversing multiple time zones for a 12:00 p.m. EST, 9:00 a.m. local kickoff time against the Indiana Hoosiers on October 26.
The game will air on the Big Ten Network, where all teams are contractually obligated to play at least one conference game, and it will come in a showdown against coach Curt Cignetti’s team, which has been one of the nation’s biggest surprises this season.
At his bye-week press conference, Fisch discussed what he learned from traveling to Iowa for a kickoff at the same time and if it affected his players.
“We definitely didn’t play well in the second half, and I don’t have a real answer if that had to were they tired? Was it the 9:00 a.m. kickoff? Did we get up to a level and couldn’t sustain it? I don’t think so,” Fisch said. “We’ll look at everything though. We talked about it [Monday] and put it any special requests that any staff members have regarding things that we could do differently or better.”
The Huskies are also entering an uncharted new world of having to travel across the country for multiple games, and Fisch continued with his thoughts on the matter.
“If you’re a West Coast team playing on the East Coast in the NFL, you’re doing it back-to-back weeks, and you’re staying for the week. You’d never be in a situation where you’re flying twice and playing the early morning kickoff…we have to make it work, we will make it work, and we’ll do the very best we can to put together the best schedule we can.”