Jedd Fisch has only played the Oregon Ducks twice in his career: once during his time at UCLA and once at Arizona. Now, he’ll face them in arguably the best rivalry game on the West Coast as the head coach of the Washington Huskies.
Plenty of college football fans around the Big Ten might not understand the deep-rooted hatred between the Huskies and Ducks as the two teams prepare to meet for matchup No. 117 on November 30.
During his weekly press conference, Fisch took a minute to discuss some of the things he’s learned about the rivalry and the hatred between the two fanbases since he arrived in Seattle.
“For me, I’d have to be on social media to see that, and I try to avoid that during the season,” he said. “You catch glimpses of it, and it’s not hard to know. It’s by region, there’s excessive hatred in Auburn/Alabama, there’s excessive hatred in Michigan/Ohio State in the Midwest, and there’s certainly excessive hatred in the Pacific Northwest between Washington and Oregon.”
While fans on both sides might not see through their hatred to look at the bigger picture, Fisch noted that the hatred is part of what makes college football so great.
“That’s the beauty of college football,” he continued. “That’s the beauty of these games, and that’s what you’re looking for. You hope that it’s a great football game, and you hope that the emotions don’t take over and you wind up becoming undisciplined, or it becomes the penalty fest that we lived through in week three of the season. We haven’t had a game like that since the last rivalry game we played…we need to play a clean game, I want us to have all the clean energy and enthusiasm, let the fans have the hatred.”