1ST & BOWL

Washington never slept here.

Washington barely slowed down.

The Husky football program, slapped into Sanctionland by the Pacific 10 Conference four years ago, could have grown docile and drowsy, then emerged from its two-year penalty period with a probation hangover.

Instead, when the loss of 20 scholarships should be hitting it hardest, Washington is a top-five team in both national preseason polls, bursting with talent, bragging about its best class of freshmen in years, and voraciously eyeing its first post-probation Rose Bowl berth.

The Huskies ended up in Pasadena on Jan. 1 for three consecutive seasons before the penalties hit. Then, after the two-year ban elapsed before the 1995 season, just missed going to the Rose Bowl twice.

“It’s been tough--because that’s our place, that’s our home,” All-American linebacker Jason Chorak said of the Rose Bowl. “We expect to be there. When we play UCLA down there, we’re going home. That’s where we feel comfortable.

“We’ve gone to the Sun Bowl; we’ve been to the Holiday Bowl. But this would be the first senior class in a long time not to have gone to the Rose Bowl, and we know that. That’s why I came here.

“If we don’t get to the Rose Bowl, I think it would be a major shock to us.”

What does not kill the Huskies apparently makes them stronger national-title prospects--especially with their schedule handing them Nebraska, USC and Washington State all at Husky Stadium this season.

Only its Sept. 6 opener at Brigham Young, which suffered its only loss at Washington last year, is an obvious road-game threat.

“This is back where you want to be,” Washington Coach Jim Lambright said between two-a-day practices, propped on a pole-vault landing mat.

The amiable, 55-year-old former defensive coordinator took over the team in crisis, two weeks before the 1993 season opener, immediately after Don James had retired to protest the severity of the Pac-10 penalties.

“This is with a smile,” Lambright said. “OK, this is not back to the early ‘90s, when we were a power and you’re thinking, ‘We can roll this thing for two or three years.’ But we’re on the edge. I think we’ve done just as good a job as you could do in keeping the program up.”

Lambright’s first season was a mini-miracle. The Huskies scraped together a 7-4 record in 1993 after the probation / retirement bombs had been dropped on them.

But the biggest victory was scored in the days after James’ retirement, when the freshmen, after much discussion, decided to stick together and outlast the sanctions. Incoming freshmen can transfer from probation-penalized schools without sitting out a year.

“I never really knew Coach James,” said tailback Rashaan Shehee, who is regaining the starting spot from Corey Dillon. “He meant a lot to everyone on the team, but I never got too attached to him. I had just got there. Our class started looking around at each other, like, ‘What do we do now?’

“Leaving would’ve been the easy thing to do. But in life, you shouldn’t take the easy way all the time.”

Washington, which cooperated with the investigation, then was stunned by the harshness of the sanctions, was penalized by the Pac-10 for NCAA rules violations concerning illegal loans and jobs given to players.

It was hardly easy, but in the four seasons since, despite the lost scholarships and bowl bans, Washington has won 30 games, more than any other Pac-10 school.

“We use those numbers a lot with our team,” Lambright said. “We try to always stress that you’re closer than you think you are. The players have done a great job of learning how to adjust goals.

“And this year, the goals are right back as high as you could possibly put them. It’s so deserved because of what this senior class has been through. And if a class is deserving of a positive, on-top season, it’s one like this that’s helped us survive these sanctions.”

The Huskies decided to redshirt that entire class, and those two dozen players--most of them from within the state--make up this year’s battle-tested seniors, from linebackers Chorak and Jerry Jensen to Shehee to defensive end Chris Campbell.

Chorak says part of the reason he didn’t seriously consider jumping to the NFL a year early was to keep the group together for the final push.

“I’m so tight with this class, I didn’t want to be the first one that jumped off the ship,” Chorak said.

The second-most important thing for Washington’s stability was Athletic Director Barbara Hedges’ decision to give Lambright a four-year contract soon after James’ departure. The interim title lasted only two weeks.

The Huskies went 7-4 again in 1994, their last probation season, and they scored a huge home victory over Miami in a game Lambright had told his players to treat as a bowl game.

In 1995, Washington went 7-4-1, tied USC for the Pac-10 title, and earned a Sun Bowl berth.

“As far as we’re concerned, that was going down,” said Shehee, who gained 957 yards and scored 15 touchdowns as a sophomore, but limped through last season with an ankle injury that allowed Dillon to seize the spot. “Seven and four, that’s not a Washington season.”

In 1996, with junior-college transfer Dillon emerging as a star power back--he gained 1,555 yards and scored 22 touchdowns, five of them against UCLA in Washington’s 41-21 romp--the Huskies got trampled at Notre Dame, but went 9-3, beating USC on the road and losing by three to Arizona State and by 12 to Colorado in the Holiday Bowl.

“I certainly didn’t have a crystal ball,” Hedges said. “But I had a lot of faith in Jim Lambright and the coaches that we had and the student-athletes that we’d recruited, and I knew they were going to do the very best job to hang in there when we had a reduction in scholarships.

“I never thought that we would have a losing season. Jim and I never talked about that. If we would’ve had one, we would’ve dealt with it. But the reality is that it’s nothing we talked about.

“The only thing we talked about was the fact that we didn’t regress, but actually progressed during a very difficult time--the fact that it hasn’t had a terribly negative effect on this program.”

Lambright, who played for Washington in the ‘60s and joined the staff under Jim Owens in 1969, says that the coaches, facing the loss of the 20 scholarships and a drastic reduction of recruiting visits for two seasons, made a point of recruiting very carefully. A wasted scholarship could have been devastating.

Plus, the redshirt program, a strong tradition at Washington, became even more focused. And, although Washington wasn’t nearly as deep as it had been during its early ‘90s heyday, which included splitting the 1991 national title with Miami, the talented players kept coming.

In 1995, the Huskies landed 6-foot-5 quarterback Brock Huard, who just happened to be the younger brother of then-starter Damon Huard.

“That was something Damon was real honest with me about,” Brock Huard said. “I wanted to know the years we were on probation, the kind of recruits we got in and what kind of players we had.

“And he said, ‘Hey, you’ve got two of the best linemen that I’ve seen in my years here, Benjy [Olson] and Tony Coats [both All-American candidates as juniors].’ And the talent level didn’t drop a ton . . . didn’t drop at all.

“If in those two years we don’t get some of the cornerstones of our offense and defense, it’s different. But I knew the strength of this program and how hard this program works. We don’t get the No. 1 Pac-10 [recruiting] class. Never. It’s always the Southern California schools. We work hard here. I think that’s the trademark of this program.

“Maybe there were going to be fewer players, but the players that were here were going to work their tails off and try to keep this program on top.”

Huard won the quarterback job last season as a redshirt freshman, beating out Shane Fortney and establishing himself as one of the West’s best. He started eight games and threw 13 touchdown passes, and still has deep threat Jerome Pathon this season.

“It’s going to come down to making the plays in the games,” Huard said. “You know, [Arizona State’s] Jake Plummer made the big plays last year in their games. That doesn’t necessarily mean I have to make the plays he did, but somebody on our team does.”

Plummer and Arizona State, of course, went to the Rose Bowl last January. USC went the year before. Oregon the year before that. And UCLA went after the 1993 season, the first year Washington was not allowed to earn a berth.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve been there,” Lambright said. “This program is ready for that this year. Yeah.”