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Washington Huskies quietly becoming an NFL factory

By Gabe Encinas

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The Washington Huskies are quietly turning into a NFL factory.

This past NFL draft, we saw three Washington Huskies go in the first round, all within the first 25 picks, all on the defensive side the ball, but draft picks coming out of Seattle have been a usual occurrence since the turn of the decade.

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Since 2010, the Huskies have 15 draft picks, all coming within the first five rounds. Other Pac-12 schools have had success sending guys to the league since 2010 as well like Pac-12 powers like USC (32 picks), Stanford (26) and Oregon (23), but you don’t expect a big number to come from Washington.

Only two of those 15 selections were outside the first three rounds with Senio Kelemete (4th round) and Alameda Ta’amu (5th round) going in the 2012 draft.

The prospects they send to the NFL had varying degrees of success too like Mason Foster, Desmond Trufant, Austin Seferian-Jenkins, Bishop Sankey, and their latest trio of first round picks in Danny Shelton, Shaq Thompson, and Marcus Peters look like impact performers.

They’re able to land some of the top recruits from the west coast and work them through their system. The facilities, uniform combos, location, atmosphere and academics, all play a factor for most of these recruits.

Now, it was Steve Sarkisian who was able to produce all that NFL talent, but Chris Petersen has had a fair amount of success in recruiting through two years. The only problem with Petersen is that he wasn’t able to do much with all that talent. Despite having three first round picks on the defensive side of the ball, Washington went 8-6, giving up nearly 24 points a game.

Maybe Peterson just needs to get acclimated and start using his own guys, but we’ll see if he can sustain the success of Sarkisian, sending Washington Huskies to the NFL.

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