Washington may be headed into Friday night at Purdue without the quarterback who has started every game for nearly a year.
Demond Williams Jr. is unlikely to play after suffering a “significant” rib injury late in the first half of last Friday’s 41-24 Big Ten loss at home to then-No. 20 Iowa. Huskies coach Jedd Fisch first described Williams as day-to-day, but his tone changed as the week went on.
“We still have to do all sorts of imaging and everything else,” Fisch said. “So I'm not under the impression he'll be playing this week based upon where he's at physically, but I don't want to predict the future either.”
Williams has opened 20 straight games, a run that dates to the final game of the 2024 regular season. Washington is 3-3 overall and 0-3 in Big Ten play, trying to stop a three-game skid in West Lafayette, Ind.
The injury hit at a rough spot for the Huskies. Washington was already trailing 27-0 when Williams went down late in the second quarter. Elijah Brown, a Stanford transfer, took over after halftime and gave the offense a lift, completing 28 of 39 passes for 251 yards and three touchdowns.
That performance has sparked talk in Seattle about whether the Huskies should make a quarterback switch. Fisch isn’t interested in turning it into a week-long referendum.
“The last thing I want to do is put added pressure on Elijah or added pressure on Demond,” Fisch said. “Right now, that's not going to benefit anybody.
Elijah needs to go out there and play the best Elijah football he can play. And Demond needs to go out there and do everything he can to try and get out there this Friday night or whatever the next game is he can play.”
Purdue arrives with some momentum of its own. The Boilermakers are 3-3 overall and 2-1 in the Big Ten after shaking off losses to UCLA and Notre Dame, which are ranked No. 12 and No. 2 in this week’s AP poll. They followed those setbacks with a 24-17 win at Illinois and a 41-13 rout of Minnesota at home.
That Minnesota win carried extra weight for Purdue running back Fame Ijeboi, who was named the Big Ten’s Offensive Player of the Week after rushing for 195 yards and three touchdowns on 31 carries against his former team.
Quarterback Ryan Browne has been efficient all season for Purdue, completing 68.9% of his passes for 1,549 yards with nine touchdowns and only one interception.
A win Friday would give Purdue its first three-game conference winning streak since 2022. That’s a notable turn for a program that entered October on a 19-game Big Ten losing streak.
“It’s always a unique challenge in this league to build the plan for the week,” Boilermakers coach Barry Odom said of the Friday night setting. “We've got to take the approach that it's a one-game season. When we do that and prepare the right way, you give your team a chance to go play free, play fast, play confident and play together.”
There will also be some familiar faces on both sidelines. Odom’s younger brother, Brian, is Washington’s inside linebackers coach, while Huskies defensive coordinator Ryan Walters coached Purdue in 2023-24.
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Purdues 41-13 win over Minnesota at Ross-Ade Stadium looked like more than just a one-off breakthrough. The Boilermakers put together a complete Big Ten performance, with the offense moving the ball, the defense controlling the game and the special teams and coaching both doing their part in a result that mattered well beyond one Saturday afternoon.
The running game, in particular, gave Purdue a different kind of edge and helped the Boilermakers stack back-to-back conference wins for the first time since the end of the 2022 season. Against the team he once backed up, Fame Ijeboi led the way in a performance that underscored how much this offense has started to settle in, and Purdue now has a chance to build on a stretch that at least hints the turnaround may be taking hold. [Read more 🡒]