What will it take for UW men's basketball to step back into the spotlight?
Mike Hopkins couldn't make the Huskies as prominent as they were during Lorenzo Romar's best years. Can anyone?
I recorded a college football podcast on Wednesday afternoon. On the surface, this is unremarkable, because co-host Danny O’Neil and I have now recorded 95 episodes of this podcast since fall of 2021, and we almost always do so on Wednesday afternoons, be it March or September. Ho hum.
Yet with the Washington men’s basketball team playing its first-round Pac-12 tournament game at noon, I figured I should ask Danny, whom I know to be typically quite invested in UW hoops, whether he wanted to delay recording until after.
He didn’t.
It reminded me of a recent conversation with a friend roughly my age, a diehard UW fan who attended the school and grew up watching Lorenzo Romar’s best teams. Given that background, I figure he should be among the program’s most engaged supporters. Instead, he barely watches, and told me he can hardly name every player in the rotation.
This is what I thought about as the clock ran out on Mike Hopkins’ UW tenure, the Huskies falling 80-74 to USC in Las Vegas, another mediocre season thrust upon the heap. It’s not that Washington was bad. The Huskies won more games than they lost (17-15 overall, 9-11 in Pac-12). They beat Gonzaga. They won at Washington State. They had the Pac-12’s leading scorer and assists leader, and the conference’s Sixth Player of the Year.