Does Washington football need a spring game?

The Negatives

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The spring showcase doesn’t get fans and recruits hyped up the way that most other programs do. Washington is one of the premier programs in the country, and fans should be foaming at the mouth to want to get into the stadium and watch the guys they’ll be rooting for in the fall show off how they’ve improved over the winter. Watching them go through cone drills and take maybe 15 snaps on the field isn’t the best way to get fans or recruits amped up.

Recruits want to see all the flashy things that UW can offer, which definitely wouldn’t make a spring showcase the biggest point of emphasis for them when they’re laying out a spring visit schedule. With maybe 5,000 people in a 70,000 seat stadium, that doesn’t give off the energy of a program that has been to three straight NY6 bowls and is going to be a serious threat for a national championship in the fall. They want to see the fans in purple and gold packing the stadium, because if they can fill up Husky Stadium in the middle of April for a meaningless spring game, they know the support they’ll see in the fall will be unrivaled.

From a marketing standpoint, the fans want this, and it’s just another great way to sell the program. All the other national powerhouse programs have a spring game, the Huskies are in a very small outlier of programs that don’t have one. Former players like Shaq Thompson are starting to speak up in favor of a spring game, because they know that the benefits greatly outweigh the risks of injury, or getting plays stolen (no one gets the Pac-12 network anyways so how are they going to see the broadcast?) which is what concerns Chris Petersen about holding a spring game.