The Washington Huskies are preparing for one of college football’s most famous traditions, Penn State’s annual White Out game. When they take the field inside Beaver Stadium on Saturday, they’ll be met by nearly 110,000 Nittany Lions fans, all dressed in white and providing one of the nation’s most hostile environments.
Jedd Fisch knows this. He’s coached in it while with the Michigan Wolverines in 2015. Although his team lost that day, he knows a thing or two about what it takes to prepare for that environment and has shared that with his team.
“I’m not concerned about it,” he said. “I showed the guys what it looks like…I talked about that a little bit. I showed them some clips of the energy and passion to expect, but on the same token, we’ve had really great crowds in every game we’ve played this year. Iowa was sold out, Indiana was sold out. It’s going to be a sellout with double the amount of people as those groups, but in the same token, we’ve just got to go play ball and see if we can play the best game we’ve played all year.”
But that doesn’t mean Fisch isn’t preparing his players for the noise. As fans and media filed into Alaska Airlines Arena on Tuesday night to watch coach Danny Sprinkle’s team start the season with a 79-73 victory over UC Davis, music was blasting from inside Husky Stadium during practice.
Fisch’s team is 0-4 away from home this season and will be walking into a very tough place to play on Saturday, but they will be prepared and feel confident they can operate in the environment.
“I don’t think it’s a worry at all,” linebacker Carson Bruener said. “It’s something where, for me personally, I love playing in hostile environments. I love playing in big stadiums; big moments are something I look forward to, they’re something I feel like I can elevate my game with.”
“I feel like I can speak for the whole defense on this as well. I feel like it doesn’t affect us, and we can almost use that crowd energy and noise to our advantage in a way. As soon as you make a play and you hear 100,000 people go silent, that’s almost as good as making a play here at Husky Stadium and hearing 72,000 people screaming.”