SEATTLE — Chris Petersen, Washington’s third-year coach and leader of this year’s College Football Playoff-bound squad, has always been a master at shutting out the media.
At Boise State, where he built the Broncos into a regular BCS buster, Petersen kept reporters at bay, limiting his players’ interactions with the media while convincing his players that they didn’t need to pay attention to anything written in newspapers or said on the radio and television. Marty Tadman, the defensive MVP of the 2007 Fiesta Bowl, the game in which Boise State famously stunned juggernaut Oklahoma, told SI earlier this season that he had no idea the Broncos were underdogs that day—because Petersen had told him to ignore the media.