Twice, with a defender closing, Demond Williams Jr. tried to slide out of the sack and threw the ball to a Gopher instead. Maverick Baranowski got one, John Nestor the other. Williams did not hide behind the protection afterward. Both interceptions came while he was trying to avoid sacks, and he said, "I've got to be smarter in that situation," meaning he should have taken the hit and kept the ball.
That is a narrow, fixable thing, which is the encouraging part. The junior who threw for 3,065 yards and 25 touchdowns while starting all 13 games in 2025 is still the best player Washington has and still the reason the ceiling exists. But last year's eight interceptions came across a full season; two in one night, from the same panic in the same situation, is a new wrinkle, and Washington plays at No. 18 USC on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. ET on NBC. Washington lost to Minnesota 27-24 in Week 4.
Why he was under siege in the first place
The sacks were not all on Williams' clock.
That is the chain to watch Saturday. When the run game gives nothing, third downs get long, the pass rush gets to pin its ears back, and Williams starts improvising. The receiving side of the rebuild held up, Dezmen Roebuck caught seven for 87 yards and a 16-yard touchdown, and tight end Baron Naone added a fourth-quarter score, so the throws are available if the down-and-distance is sane.
The parts of the loss that were not the quarterback
Two more things belong in the ledger.
And Jedd Fisch put a late-game mistake on himself. Trailing 27-17 with 2:27 left and the ball at the Minnesota 13, Washington never got another snap off before the two-minute warning because a personnel substitution arrived late, costing roughly 27 seconds. "We wound up subbing, and the sub came in way too late," Fisch said. In a three-point loss, 27 seconds is real.
The genuinely good news is the thing that had been ugly. Washington was flagged five times for 40 yards. That is one fewer way to lose a road game in Los Angeles.
What Saturday is worth
The simulations give Washington about a 33% chance at the Coliseum, and the gap between outcomes is where the interest lives. A win pushes the Huskies' playoff odds to roughly 10%, a loss drops them to about 4%, with Big Ten title-game odds moving between 1.8% and 0.1% on the same result. Neither branch makes this a championship season by itself.
There is also precedent worth remembering, and it is recent. The last time these teams met, in November 2024, Washington won 26-21 at Husky Stadium and stopped Woody Marks on fourth-and-goal from the 1 before Miller Moss's final fourth-down pass fell incomplete in the closing minutes. This staff has beaten this program in exactly the kind of game Saturday could become.
Zoom out and you see why this one week carries weight. Washington went 14-1 and played for the national title after 2023, fell to 6-7 in 2024 and rebounded to 9-4 in 2025. The whole point of 2026 was proving the rebound was a floor and not a bounce. Saturday was the first evidence against that. So the specific thing to watch at the Coliseum is not the scoreboard first. It is Williams with a rusher in his face on third-and-9, deciding whether to take the sack. Do that three or four times and Washington is probably still in it late.
Full numbers are in the interactive guide, and the model is explained in the methodology.