Michael Lev: Washington showed Jedd Fisch the money, and Arizona is left scrounging

Jedd Fisch is either the biggest hypocrite of all time ... or made a career move that any of us would have made.

Fisch spoke multiple times this past season — his last as Arizona’s head coach, it turned out — about the grass not always being greener on the other side.

Here’s the money quote, if you will. It was about the transfer portal, and Fisch said it just a little over a month ago, on Dec. 4, the day after the Wildcats received their Alamo Bowl bid:

“There’s the few that everyone likes to talk about that made decisions for financial sake. In that case, is that really a wise decision? I can tell you that if we were only making decisions based on money, there would be a lot of different scenarios occurring out here. There’s a lot more that has to go into it besides money.”

Forty-one days later, the University of Washington showed Fisch the money. And he took it. It’s a lot easier to grow grass in soggy Seattle than torrid Tucson.

Fisch said in a social-media post that he was “broken-hearted” to leave Arizona and that it was a “gut-wrenching and agonizing decision.” But money has a way of making the pain go away. I’m pretty sure he’ll have little trouble sleeping at night with more than $50 million headed his way.

The contract Fisch got from UW was massive — terms that the UA had no chance of matching. He’s getting $7.75 million per season over seven years. Using the USA Today salary database for 2023, that’d make Fisch the 13th-highest-paid coach in the country. Maybe he deserves it. He’s also been a head coach for just three years and has only one winning season. In that sense, UW is taking a sizable risk.

The UA had an offer on the table for Fisch that was more than reasonable, in a vacuum anyway: five years with an average salary of $5.1 million. That would have been a raise of almost 40% from Fisch’s average of $3.66 million from the contract extension he signed 13 months ago.

Fisch’s buyout would have risen from $5.5 million to $10 million, giving the UA a boost when it comes to hiring the next coach. That’s one reason not getting the deal done a month ago — sometime in the week following the Territorial Cup — ended up being harmful.

Another reason: It sent a troubling message to Fisch and his representatives. If the UA was truly serious about becoming a top-tier football program, it sure had a funny way of showing it.

Of course, as I emphasized last week, the university’s financial issues and the Arizona Board of Regents made getting a deal finalized harder than it should have been. The timing was terrible. The optics wouldn’t have been great. But would the PR hit have been any worse than it is today? “Arizona proves it’s a steppingstone yet again” isn’t a headline any UA supporter wants to read.

Was this about more than just money? For sure. A friend of mine who used to live in Seattle insists that UW football is the biggest game in town — a town that includes the NFL Seahawks and MLB Mariners, among others. I don’t think Fisch will have to beg fans to show up for games, as he regularly did here.

He’ll also have greater resources when it comes to the assistant coach salary pool and NIL. That stuff matters.

The reality is, UW is a higher-level job than Arizona. It’s not at the very top of college football’s hierarchy, but it’s only a rung or two down. The UA remains somewhere in the middle. And that isn’t likely to change.

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Fisch could have gambled on a repeat of the Wildcats’ 2023 success — or something even greater — by coming back for at least one more year. Arizona was set up to thrive in ’24 before Fisch left. Now, with players able to leave via the portal when there’s a coaching change, all bets are off. The roster Fisch built here could be gutted by the end of the week — which stinks for fans, the players who decide to stay and whoever the next coach is.

Is “everything in a better place” at the UA than when Fisch got here, as he suggested in his social post? Unquestionably. The program might have been the worst in Power Five when he arrived.

With Fisch and the nucleus of the team in place, Arizona might have been the favorite to win the Big 12 in its rookie season in the league. The Wildcats were a consensus Top 15 team in the various Way Too Early Top 25s. Now? Who knows.

Fisch would have had an easier path to the expanded College Football Playoff here, in my opinion. With Oklahoma and Texas heading for the SEC, the Big 12 is ripe for the taking.

But some have pushed back against that notion, speculating that the Big 12 will become what’s referred to in other sports as a “one-bid league.” Conversely, they argue, the Big Ten and SEC will take up half or even two-thirds of the 12 spots. We’ll see.

I firmly believe it would have felt different if Fisch had left a year from now for, say, Florida, his alma mater, or perhaps an NFL job.

If he pursued what we presume to be his dream job in Gainesville, could you have blamed him? If he departed for an NFL head-coaching gig — the very top of the profession — could you have faulted him? UW is a better job than UA. It’s neither of those.

It still would have been agonizing. But at least the NFL-bound studs from the 2022 recruiting class — Tetairoa McMillan, Jonah Savaiinaea, Jonah Coleman, Ephesians Prysock, Tacario Davis — would have completed their third seasons. At that point, they might have left for the pros anyway. Now they might migrate to Montlake.

UW was in a position to make Fisch an offer he couldn’t refuse. Can any of us say we would have turned it down? It’s easy to say; it’s not easy to do. We’re talking about more security and more than double the salary.

“I’m not mad at him,” said freshman receiver Brandon Phelps, who just arrived on campus and jumped on an “X Spaces” session hosted by my colleague Justin Spears on Sunday night. “You gotta provide for your family.”

Phelps did concede that he’s confused and unsure what to do next. You’re not alone, Brandon. Seeing Fisch in UW colors, we’re all in a purple haze.

Confounded. Disappointed. Angry. Resigned.

Fisch pitched himself as something different — a true leader of men. We all bought in. And his Wildcats delivered a season for the ages.

He turned out to be the same as every other coach looking to climb the career ladder — an opportunist. We should have seen it coming. And now the program he rebuilt could backslide faster than you can say, “It’s personal.”