The attendance issue at Washington

Husky Stadium was plenty loud on Saturday night, but if anyone wonders why it wasn't sold out, you should look at the people who plan the games as opposed to the fans who attend them.

Four college roommates flew a combined total of 13,262 miles to spend 48 hours in the city where we went to school to watch the football team notch its most impressive win in at least four years.

We came from Alaska, Arizona, Texas and New York and were rewarded for effort by enduring an absolute boondoggle of a security line at Sea-Tac airport. The guy from Texas missed his flight despite arriving at the airport two and a half hours before departure.

Still, it was a hell of a game, and a great weekend. I feel incredibly fortunate to have stayed in touch with my friends from the University of Washington and am thankful we have the means and the opportunity to converge in Seattle.

I am pointing all this out because I want to explain the full context of why I feel compelled to raise my voice any time someone associated with the University of Washington football even subtly complains about the attendance. This is something that happened last week. A lot. Both the complaints and my yelling.

Attendance wasn’t great the first two games at Husky Stadium. I know in part because we couldn’t find anyone to take the four tickets in our season-ticket allotment let alone sell them.

But I also recognize that the attendance isn’t just the carryover from a fairly miserable season in 2021, but a direct result of Washington’s schedule over the past 10 years or so. It has declined in terms of quality – which it’s working to fix – and absolutely unbearable in terms of the timing, which shows absolutely no signs of improving.