If looked at from a certain angle, the LA Bowl is a gift for Washington
By Stalin
The plane banks low over the smog-softened sprawl of Los Angeles, and if you squint just right, you can almost see it—history not as a clean line, but as a stubborn thread, frayed and knotted and still refusing to break. The Washington Huskies, heirs to a cold rain tradition and the long echo of Husky Stadium’s roar, are headed not to glory’s main stage, not to Pasadena’s marble promises, but to the LA Bowl. Not the Rose. Not the Playoff. But something truer in its way: a Saturday night game against Boise State, a team that has made a cottage industry out of upsetting men who thought they were owed more.
This is where football lives, in this strange middle ground. Not in the corporate sheen of championship week, but in the half-full hotel lobbies, the late-night team dinners, the last ride for seniors who bled into November. For Washington, the LA Bowl is not a consolation—it’s a proving ground. It’s a chance to gather up the scraps of a long season, to stitch them into something like a flag… Ah, who the fuck am I kidding? Yeah, it's a consolation.
Boise State arrives the way they always do, with blue turf in their eyes and the ghost of trick plays hovering in their backfield. They are the great disrupters, the polite wrecking crew of Western football, showing up with a chip on their shoulder and a playbook that reads like a dare. But Chris Petersen isn't walking through that door anytime soon. Check that, maybe he is— Have they announced who will be doing the broadcast?
But for Washington, this LA Bowl is a far from perfect scenario. If you win, well you were supposed to win, weren't ya? If you lose, it's yet another embarrassing performance right up there with the Wisconsin debacle.
And Los Angeles, for all its shallow reputation, is a solid host. The doogs will find each other there. They always do. They’ll be the ones in worn hoodies and faded Jake Locker jerseys, talking about old Rose Bowls, about Don James and Warren Moon, about Chris Petersen and Jake "Cobra" Browning, about seasons when everything felt possible. They’ll talk about how this 2025 team grew, how it staggered, how it never completely fell apart, and how the season was capped with the greatest recruiting class in UW history! They will talk about the young men who still have one more chance to put good tape on their name.
That is the beauty of the Gronk Fest LA Bowl: no one is pretending this is bigger than it is. It’s honest football. It’s an intersection of pride and relief and gratitude. Gratitude that there is one more Saturday. One more bus ride. One more chance to hit someone wearing different colors.
For the Huskies, it’s a gift wrapped in a humble box. A chance to turn a long, bruising season into a memory that doesn’t taste like cold leftovers. And for those who love the game in the naive way you’re supposed to love it—the LA Bowl is a last good, clean fight under a golden California moon and in the shadowy stink of Gavin Newsom's Skid Row.