Joel McHale Talks Love for Washington Huskies Football Ahead of College Football Playoff (Exclusive)

The Washington Huskies football team is two games away from winning a national championship. The team will play the Texas Longhorns in the CFP semifinals (Sugar Bowl) on New Year’s Day at 8:45 p.m. ET. As a University of Washington alum, Joel McHale will be watching the game, and PopCulture.com spoke to McHale during the regular season about his love for the Huskies. 

“We have a tough couple games ahead of us with Oregon State and well, Washington State’s always good, but [Michael] Penix is just so good,” McHale told PopCulture. “And the game, we barely squeaked by Arizona, he had full-on flu and I think last week against USC was such a high-flying, crazy, I felt like every team was going to score on every drive. And they practically did.”

Washington finished the season undefeated and winning the Pac-12 championship. It’s the team’s 18th conference title in school history and the first since 2018. As far as national titles go, the Huskies have won two in its history, most recently in 1991. Michael Penix Jr. is the team’s starting quarterback and won the Maxwell Award, which is given to the best all-around player in the country. He also was a Heisman Trophy finalist and finished second in voting behind LSU quarterback Jayden Daniels. 

McHale also talked about how the team was when he was a student. “So as a Husky, I was there when we were really good, and then we got really bad,” he said. “We kind of came back a bit and then we were terrible. And so now it’s really nice to get some national recognition.”

Washington would love to win the national title before the playoffs expand to 12 teams next season. Along with that, the Pac-12 conference will virtually no longer exist as most of the teams in the conference will move to other conferences across the country. Washington will join the Big Ten Conference along with USC, UCLA and Oregon. 

“I think the SEC, there’s such, there’s been a lot of bias I think over the years,” McHale said. “And not just bias but they consolidated power. Now we’re all in the Big Ten which is… Some people are like, ‘It’s terrible.’ And I talked to a lot of players and they’re like, ‘It’s good.’ That playing field needs to be leveled because if a team from the South or the East Coast gets one loss, it doesn’t seem to affect their ranking but if a West Coast team does, then they drop out completely.”