Washington
Could Kalani Sitake, Kyle Whittingham or Bronco Mendenhall be the next coach at Washington?
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25077907/merlin_3006272.jpg "Could Kalani Sitake, Kyle Whittingham or Bronco Mendenhall be the next coach at Washington?")
Lest anyone thought the annual college football coaching carousel had stopped spinning several weeks ago, this week brought the biggest change of all when legendary Alabama head coach Nick Saban announced his retirement.
On Friday evening, Alabama announced that it has hired now-former Washington head coach Kalen DeBoer to take on the Herculean task of replacing Saban, leaving a very attractive job open in Seattle.
Who could replace DeBoer?
It is still early in the process (although these things tend to move very quickly), but already three names with Utah ties have been mentioned as possibilities.
Early Friday afternoon when it appeared that DeBoer to Alabama was all but a done deal, ESPN’s Pete Thamel floated Utah head coach Kyle Whittingham and BYU head coach Kalani Sitake as potential candidates to move to the Pacific Northwest.
Thamel’s list included seven other names: Kansas head coach Lance Leipold, Arizona head coach Jedd Fisch, Iowa State head coach Matt Campbell, Washington offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb, UNLV head coach Barry Odom, Kansas State head coach Chris Klieman and Wake Forest head coach Dave Clawson.
A short time later, a story by The Athletic’s Chris Vannini was published in which he named Sitake and former BYU/Virginia head coach and current New Mexico head coach Bronco Mendenhall as possibilities.
Vannini observed that Sitake has a 61-41 record during his time as BYU’s head coach, “including two 10-win seasons and top-20 finishes in 2020 and 2021. Throw in 2022, and the Cougars went 29-9 over a three-year stretch. Sitake is plenty familiar with the West Coast, with a decade of experience at Utah and a year at Oregon State before getting the BYU head coaching job. He built the program back into a winner, but his Big 12 debut was a letdown, with a 5-7 overall record and a 2-7 record in conference play.”
As for Mendenhall, Vannini wrote, “The former BYU and Virginia head coach has just started as the head coach at New Mexico, and it might be difficult to immediately take another job, but Washington would obviously be a major step up. Mendenhall went 99-43 as BYU head coach, followed by a 36-38 run at Virginia that included an Orange Bowl appearance in 2019. He’s from Utah and played and coached at Oregon State.”
Grubb, Texas defensive coordinator Pete Kwiatkowski, Campbell, Leipold, Fisch, Cal head coach Justin Wilcox, Florida State offensive coordinator Alex Atkins, Air Force head coach Troy Calhoun, Washington State head coach Jake Dickert, San Jose State head coach Brent Brennan, former Boise State/Auburn head coach Bryan Harsin and recently departed Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll were the other possibilities mentioned by Vannini.
Trinity Rodman signs record deal with Washington Spirit
USWNT forward Trinity Rodman signed a three-year deal with the NWSL’s Washington Spirit. The deal makes Rodman the highest-paid female footballer in the world.
unbranded – Sport
Washington Spirit goalkeeper Aubrey Kingsbury has announced that she and her husband Matt are expecting a baby in July.
The couple made the announcement in a video on the Spirit’s social media channels, holding a baby goalkeeper jersey on the pitch at Audi Field.
Kingsbury becomes the most recent Spirit star to go on maternity leave, following defender Casey Krueger, midfielder Andi Sullivan and forward Ashley Hatch.
Sullivan gave birth to daughter Millie in July, while Hatch welcomed her son Leo in January.
Krueger announced she was pregnant with her second child in October.
Kingsbury has served as the Spirit’s starting goalkeeper since 2018, and has been named the NWSL Goalkeeper of the Year twice (2019 and 2021).
The 34-year-old has two caps with the U.S. women’s national team, and was named to the 2023 World Cup roster.
The club captain will leave a major void for the Spirit, who have finished as NWSL runner-up in back-to-back seasons.
Sandy MacIver and Kaylie Collins are expected to compete for the starting role while Kingsbury is on maternity leave.
The Spirit kick off their 2026 campaign on March 13 against the Portland Thorns.
YAKIMA, Wash. — Yakima could soon take a major step toward redesigning Sixth Avenue after the Washington State Public Works Board awarded the city a $985,600 loan.
The loan was approved for the design engineering phase of the Sixth Avenue project. The funding can also be used along Sixth Avenue for utility replacement and updated ADA use.
The Yakima City Council must decide whether to accept the award. If the council accepts it, the city’s engineering work will move forward with the design of Sixth Avenue.
The cost of installing trolley lines is excluded from the plan. The historic trolleys would need to raise the funds required to add trolley lines.
The award is scheduled to be discussed during next week’s City Council meeting.
Microsoft will ramp up its investment in the University of Washington.
Brad Smith, the company’s president, made the announcement at a press conference with University of Washington President Robert Jones on Tuesday.
That means hiring more UW graduates as interns at Microsoft, he said.
And he said all students, faculty, and researchers should have access to free, or at least deeply-discounted, AI.
“ Some of it is compute that Microsoft is donating, and some of it is pursuant to an agreement where, believe me, we give the University of Washington probably the best pricing that anybody’s gonna find anywhere,” Smith said. He assured the small group of reporters present that it would be “many millions of dollars of additional computational resources.”
The announcement today didn’t include any specific numbers.
But Smith said Microsoft has already invested $165 million in the UW over several decades.
He pointed to Jones’ vision to spur “radical collaborations with businesses and communities to advance positive change,” and eliminate “any artificial barriers between the university and the communities it serves.”
Microsoft’s goal is for AI to help UW researchers solve some of the world’s biggest problems without introducing new ones.
At Tuesday’s announcement, several research students were present to demonstrate how AI supports their work.
Amelia Keyser-Gibson is an environmental scientist at the UW. She’s using AI to analyze photographs of vines, to find which adapt best to climate change.
It’s a paradox: AI produces carbon emissions. At the same time, it’s also a new tool to help reduce them.
So how do those things square for Keyser-Gibson?
“ That’s a great question, and honestly, I don’t know the answer to that,” she said. “I’m highly aware that there’s a lot of environmental impact of using AI, but what I can say is that this has allowed us to make research innovations that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.”
“If we had had to manually annotate every single image that would’ve been an undergrad doing that for hours,” Keyser-Gibson continued. “And we didn’t have the budget. We didn’t have the manpower to do that.”
“AI exists. If we don’t use it as researchers, we’re gonna fall behind.”
Microsoft reports on its own carbon emissions. But like most AI companies, it doesn’t reveal everything.
That’s one reason another UW student named Zhihan Zhang is using AI to estimate how much energy AI is using.
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