What surprised Washington coach Jedd Fisch about his team's White Out week trip to Penn State?

Penn State is set for its annual White Out game. For the first time, it will play Washington in the game featuring an all-white-clad crowd in Beaver Stadium. It is the first time the two sides meet in the regular season since the 1920s. It’s also both the first time the Huskies and Lions play a Big Ten game, and also head coach Jedd Fisch’s first time experiencing a White Out as the leader of a program. He did see it once as an assistant at Michigan back in 2015. Yet, one particular part of the trip surprised him, he told reporters on Thursday.

“We’re wearing white, we’re wearing white,” Fisch said when asked about his team’s uniform combinations for the game, per Huskies Wire. “They don’t wear white at their White Out. I was surprised too, I thought we were going to wear purple, I was fine with that. But we wear white, they wear blue, and I didn’t know that. But I did ask that yesterday, and that’s what I was told.”

Penn State always wears blue at home, of course. That’s per NCAA rules. However, Fisch is not the only person to ever think, or question, whether the Lions wear white during the White Out game. James Franklin was asked about it back in 2019.

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“First of all, part of the White Out is the contrast,” he said. “It helps us if everybody else is in white, it makes our players stand out on the field for our quarterback and those types of things. That’s the first thing. The other thing is, we can’t wear white at home. There’s NCAA rules. We can’t show up and wear whatever we want to wear. We would have to get permission from the opposing team to allow us wear white, and I would never do that for anybody else, so we haven’t even kind of gone that route.”

What else did Jedd Fisch say about Penn State?

The Huskies are leaving Seattle at 1 p.m. ET and are set to land at 5:30 p.m. ET. They are flying into State College Friday and out of Harrisburg International Airport after the game. Besides the uniform question, Fisch was asked two other queries about the Nittany Lions during his Thursday news conference. The quotes below are courtesy of Huskies Wire, and you can read the full story here.

On Penn State tight end Tyler Warren:

“He’s a fantastic player,” Fisch said. “He’s everywhere. Snapping the ball, running for touchdowns down the middle of the field, he’s taking the ball at quarterback in short-yardage plays. He’s throwing the ball, not just running it. He’s a lefty passer, I think. I saw him complete some balls into the flat, I saw him hit a curl route. His pass-catching ability – there was a play in the Ohio State game where he was really covered like a glove and came down with an unbelievable catch.

“He’s really almost impossible to cover because of his size. He’s just such a special player in that regard. We’re gonna have to find him, we’re gonna have to have an eye on him. We’re gonna have to know he’s always gonna make some plays. But in the end, they’re going to find ways to try to get him the ball and we’re going to have to find ways to minimize his opportunities to make explosive plays.”

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On the Penn State defense:

““Coach [Tom] Allen got there this year, does a great job with playing an aggressive style of defense. You can tell he’s very confident in his two corners, one transfer from Florida, one from Georgia. He’s confident in his nickel, his safeties can cover. He’s not afraid to play Cover 1 a lot, certainly their lead coverage and that’s always a great challenge. That’s a challenge to every wide receiver in America, that they’re not afraid to play you in man-to-man and they’ll spot you up and press you, then that’s a challenge, and then you’ve got to see how am I going to handle that challenge? Can I win or can I not win?

“They mix in zone enough that you really can’t get a beat on how often they’re going to play man, or when they’re going to play man. You just kind of know that at the end of the game, you’re going to see a lot more man than you are zone. They do a great job, and they’re a really physical, big football team that you can tell coach [James] Franklin, for the last 11 years, has created the team that he wants it to look like.”