Petersen says UW — picked to win Pac-12 North — must rebuild

LOS ANGELES — At this very same venue last summer, Chris Petersen repeatedly warned against the growing consensus that the Washington Huskies might have one of the Pac-12’s best football teams.

UW’s coach did this because, he said, the Huskies had won only seven games the year prior, and therefore had done little to portend a breakthrough in 2016.

Then they had a breakthrough in 2016, winning 12 games and the Pac-12 championship en route to an appearance in the College Football Playoff.

So if Petersen hated last year’s hype — and boy, did he — he could not have much enjoyed Wednesday’s gathering in the Ray Dolby Ballroom at the Loews Hollywood Hotel, the site of this year’s Pac-12 media days.

USC was picked by media to win the conference championship game. But the Huskies are the overwhelming favorites to repeat as Pac-12 North champions, garnering 49 of a possible 52 first-place votes in the annual preseason poll. And while 28 voters tabbed the Trojans as the predicted winner of the Pac-12 title game, the Huskies also received 22 votes for that distinction.

And, understandably, Petersen wants little to do with such discussions, no matter the perceived strength of a team that returns the league’s Offensive Player of the Year at quarterback, two running backs who combined to rush for more than 2,000 yards last season, an experienced offensive line and six defensive starters.

“I don’t think you reload. That’s not our mentality at all — at all,” Petersen said. “We rebuild. That’s just the mindset. We’re not even kind of the same team we were last year. So that’s always our process. We start from ground zero. We take nothing for granted.”

Likewise, Jake Browning, UW’s junior quarterback and one of two media-day player representatives — senior linebacker Keishawn Bierria was the other — said it is as important as ever to ignore anything said or written about him, good or bad.

“Complacency will kill you, no matter who you are,” said Browning, who set a school record last season with 43 touchdown passes and finished sixth in the Heisman Trophy voting. “I mean, last year, we had hype, and I was barely above .500 as a starter. So I think complacency, if you start reading too much about yourself, how great you are — I don’t care who you are, that’s going to affect you.”

Petersen concedes that he feels good about this year’s team, but as usual, he was quick to point out all that the Huskies lost from last season, particularly “all these good NFL players,” a reference to draft picks John Ross III, Kevin King, Budda Baker, Sidney Jones and Elijah Qualls.

“We’ll see where we’re at,” Petersen said. “We had a good spring. We’ve had a good summer. Huge fall camp in front of us, and our preseason’s going to be interesting, how we adapt, all these new positions, these holes we’ve got to fill. Whole new set of challenges.”

Browning acknowledged that last season’s final game — a 24-7 loss to Alabama in the national semifinals — established a benchmark for the kind of progress the Huskies would like to make. That game in particular, Browning said, moved him to place greater emphasis on getting bigger and stronger during the offseason.

After recovering from offseason shoulder surgery — he says he feels 100 percent, and the surgery is now a distant memory — Browning said that if he had an hour of free time, he typically split it between a workout and watching film, “whereas before, it would be an hour of film.”

Being around five NFL draft picks provided motivation, too, particularly in “how much they prepare physically and get their bodies ready and how they eat healthy. It’s kind of dawned on me — and I’m not sure why — that maybe it’s a good idea to start eating healthy and do some of these different things.”

A bulked-up, Heisman-candidate quarterback — and Browning does look a little sturdier than he did in the spring — would seem to augment the perception of UW as a national-title contender.

But like their coach, Browning and Bierria would rather there be no perception at all.

“That’s how our team wants it. We don’t need the hype,” Bierria said. “We don’t want it. The only thing we care about is focusing on our process and getting ready for the season.”