Chris Petersen, Washington head coach: Can he return the Huskies to greatness?

Nam Le: To me, they swung for the fences with Mora, missed, but hit a triple and found home after a wild pitch. Still scored.

They took the most qualified coach available, and no one can fault them for that. Only real question right now is if he can recruit against Sark, Mora and company.

Berkelium97: They did it, they managed to capture The White Whale. They did what UCLA, USC, Cal, Arkansas, and nearly every program with a coaching vacancy in the last 5 years couldn't do, lure Chris Petersen out of Boise. My big concern is that the Pac-12 North now has Chris Petersen, Mike Leach, Mark Helfrich, Mike Riley, and David Shaw. That is a tough, tough group of coaches for us to face every year. It's hard to envision us rising to the top any time soon.

TwistNHook: Well, we will see. Let's look at Utah to see another situation where a "genius" coach struggles when he gets into the big time. They can't face off against New Mexico State anymore. The Pac-12 North is one of the toughest divisions in college football these days. Petersen may find out that it'll be tougher than he thinks to coach in this division.

Having said that, despite Cal losing to Sark the last 5 years, Sark never seemed that good at UW. Petersen could definitely push them higher and higher.

Nick Kranz: It's hard to see a future in which Petersen isn't at least as successful as Sarkisian was, and Petersen benefits from the fact that Sark has already done the dirty work of rebuilding from Ty Willingham's zero win debacle. He'll be inheriting a reasonable amount of talent, certainly at least on par with what he would have in most years at Boise St., so really the only reason he might be tripped up is because the conference is so hyper-competitive at the moment.

Avinash Kunnath: Hey, remember when I wrote that long missive on why Cal should hire Chris Petersen a year ago? I knew it was a pipe dream, and I knew we were going to end up seeing someone else land him who would immediately drive me up the wall. .

It figures the meddling Dawgs would be the ones to finally snatch him out of Boise. Outside of USC and Oregon, Washington has the most money to spend in the conference, and the Huskies were able to lure him away when other big pocketed Pac-12 schools couldn't. Why Petersen prefers Seattle to Los Angeles or the Bay Area is anyone's guess, but I'm guessing the deep-pocketed donors raised all the money they could find to get Petersen the same way they landed Lupoi two years previous, and he'll have plenty of money to throw around to get the best coaching staff he can find.

Will he do well? I mean, the main reason they probably hired him was because of his success against big-time programs, It's one thing to battle one big opponent a year rather than having to go through the entire gamut of big conference opponents. Recruiting to Seattle shouldn't be too hard a sell in the long-term, and the Huskies have been a pro-style team since forever.

Petersen will have a lot to work with to make Washington a Pac-12 title team. We're just going to have to hope we can build faster.