Some college football programs produce Hall of Famers. Washington brings them in. Bill Belichick and Pete Carroll each spent several days at the Huskies’ facility during spring practice, and it would surprise no one if Steve Spurrier were to show up. Belichick’s son Steve is Washington’s defensive coordinator, and Carroll’s son Brennan coordinates the offense, but the Huskies’ ties to the elder Belichick and Carroll are not just familial. New head coach Jedd Fisch worked for both men as well as for Mike Shanahan, Jim Harbaugh, Sean McVay and Brian Billick. Fisch talked recently about the lessons he has learned from each and how he has applied them to the programs he has led—first Arizona, which went 10–3 in 2023, and now Washington, which hired him in January. (His comments have been lightly edited for clarity.)
Fisch did not play high school football growing up—he was a tennis player—but he arrived at the University of Florida hoping to become a coach. He eventually landed a position as a student assistant and then served as a graduate assistant.
Before every game, [Spurrier] wrote on the whiteboard: Have fun competing. I’ve done the same thing.
It wasn’t fun in the manner of, like, music blaring at practice. That wasn’t the mentality. The fun was, we threw the ball when nobody threw it, to three and four wide receivers. All of that was fun.
I just feel as if you never can lose the joy of competition. You smile when you make big plays. You celebrate making that happen. You have to coach it every day at practice.
We don’t call it practice. We call it recess. I remind my players every single day: They’re going out to recess. When they get into the real world, there is no two-and-a half hours running around in gym clothes, chasing a ball. You have this opportunity to accomplish that now. We emphasize that in our everyday communication.
In a sport where coaches often brag about how many hours they work, Spurrier was a proud outlier, telling his coaches to go home and playing golf with his staff. On Wednesdays, players’ families were invited to join the team for dinner. Fisch does the same.
Brian Billick (2004–07)
After spending two years as a quality control assistant with the Texans, from 2002–03, Fisch got a job as an offensive assistant with Billick’s Ravens. With the Vikings, Billick had been the hottest offensive coordinator in the NFL, but his Ravens teams were built around a fierce defense led by linebacker Ray Lewis and safety Ed Reed.
One word: Confidence. He inspired it. He was able to command a room, run a team meeting in a manner that everybody believed we were going to win. Managing egos … if you think about that group, I just give him so much credit.
He was able to be one of the best offensive coaches in the ’90s, and then win [a Super Bowl] on defense. He wanted to win championships more than stroke his ego. I can’t believe he didn’t get another head coaching job after the nine years he spent in Baltimore. It’s shocking to me. Brian Billick, without a doubt, had one of the biggest impacts on my entire career.
The Ravens fired Billick after the 2007 season and hired John Harbaugh, who did not retain Fisch. In Shanahan’s final season in Denver, he hired Fisch as his receivers coach.
He is brilliant. The offense that all of us run comes from Mike Shanahan. We’ve all tweaked it, we’ve all adjusted it, but the principles—understanding how to attack a defense—start with Mike Shanahan. He is by far the greatest in regard to teaching you how to attack a defense and doing things that are not necessarily ordinary football. It’s O.K. [for receivers] to be in splits that nobody was in back in the day. He was more of a [pre-snap] motion coach than any coach in the 1990s.
One of Fisch’s most vivid memories of Shanahan’s fearless play-calling wizardry came when he was on the opposing sideline, as a Ravens assistant.
We were down three. They had the ball. Second down. He called a reverse. Nobody was going to take those risks. But he understands the game of football.
Pete Carroll (2010)
Fisch spent a year at the University of Minnesota as offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach before returning to the NFL as Carroll’s QB coach in Seattle.
With Pete, he kept it simple. I work really hard to try to do that. I don’t think I’ve accomplished it nearly as well as Pete has.
He reminds you it’s all about the ball. My first year at Arizona, we were the worst takeaway team in the country. We took the ball away six times in 2021.
Those Wildcats went 1–11. Next year they were 5–7.
In Year 3, I finally made [turnovers] our No. 1 goal. You know the saying: You get what you emphasize. If you’re going to emphasize scheme or blitzing, or man coverage or go routes, you’re going to get that.
We started every single day with a turnover-and-takeaway drill. After practice we asked, How did we do protecting the ball? How did we do taking it away? We showcased it. It was an automatic game ball if you took the ball away. It just struck me I was missing the most basic Pete Carroll principle.
In Fisch’s final game at Arizona, an Alamo Bowl win over Oklahoma, the Wildcats forced six turnovers—as many as in his entire first season.
The change in a three-year period because of me reminding myself: Get back to the basics. It starts and ends with the ball.
Does he start Washington’s practices with a turnover-and-takeaway drill?
Oh yeah. I’m never not going to do that again.
Fisch left the Seahawks to be the University of Miami’s offensive coordinator. He stayed there for two seasons and took the Jaguars’ offensive coordinator job. Then he went to Michigan to coach quarterbacks and receivers and coordinate the passing game for two seasons under Harbaugh.
I think I would say with Jim: Football is hard. I remind our guys of that every day: What we’re asking you to do is very difficult. If this was easy, 75,000 people would be doing it and 11 would be watching it every Saturday. You’ll see our guys put that on their IGs and tweets.
You can’t expect to win, you can’t expect to compete at the highest level, if you don’t put the work in.
The pride that Jim showed at Michigan: Yes, it’s his alma mater, but he gets his team to bleed maize and blue. He gets his team to work at a level they never thought they would, because they recognize how much fun winning is.
Harbaugh famously gives his team work shirts and hard hats to hammer home the blue-collar work ethic.
We don’t do that—don’t do the hard hats, per se. But we message it in the same manner. Our guys recognize that there is a toughness we expect out of them. There is a relentlessness.
Coach Harbaugh is the absolute best at squeezing every drip of water out of the towel. He lives for the things that aren’t easy. He loves to find the rule that no one knows about, the guy on the roster that nobody knows about. He’ll say to the coaches: “I’ll coach him. If you guys don’t think he’s good enough, I’ll coach him.”
Sean McVay (2018–19)
After spending the 2017 season as UCLA’s offensive coordinator, Fisch served as the Bruins’ head coach for their bowl game. When Chip Kelly, who was set on calling his own plays, was hired to take over UCLA, Fisch moved on to become an offensive assistant to Rams coach Sean McVay. The Rams made the Super Bowl in Fisch’s first year with the team. McVay is considered one of the game’s best offensive minds, but the biggest lesson Fisch learned from him did not involve X’s and O’s.
You win with people; you compete with schematics. That is a saying we lived with. You have to build relationships with players first and foremost. We are a player-driven program. We bring in the right people, then compete with our schematics. How good can we be in that regard? But in the end, it’s going to be about the people. Do everything we can with the people to make sure our players and our coaches have [strong] relationships.
Fisch left the Rams to take what would be his final assistant job when he became the Patriots’ quarterbacks coach.
I try to emulate the way he communicates to the team and the staff. You’re always challenging them to get better. There is a competitive stamina that Coach Belichick has that allows you to consistently work at your highest level every single day. Your need to turn over every stone, not assume anything—almost to the extreme of “assume nothing.”
Belichick had a reputation for grilling his assistants to ensure his team was prepared for any scenario. Where some see a relentless interrogator, Fisch had another takeaway.
I think he’s the best listener I’ve ever been around. It’s not that if you get it wrong, you have a problem. It’s that he will remind you of what you said, or what your position was, and ask you what changed. Have you done due diligence before coming up with that opinion? He’s going to make sure you are consistent in your messaging. I never felt there was a time he made me feel bad about myself, or that I was getting scolded. He was always looking to make you better.
Belichick taught Fisch another important lesson: Preparation does not end at kickoff.
He really sees the first quarter as an evaluation quarter. Then you use the second and third quarters to make adjustments, and the fourth to close out games.
Fisch’s 2023 Arizona team outscored its 13 opponents by 20 points in the first quarter—and 153 points after that.
Addendum
When Fisch was a student at Florida, he shared an apartment with Howie Roseman, who is now the general manager of the Eagles. What did he learn from his frat brother?
Live your dream. He would probably say he learned that from me and I learned that from him. None of our friends thought we were very smart to say we wanted to be a general manager and a head coach. I think our friends thought we were crazy and dumb.
