This Week’s Man Crush: Nick Holt, UW Defensive Coordinator

Up until maybe Tuesday morning or so, there was no good reason for USC defensive coordinator Nick Holt to join his buddy Steve Sarkisian at Washington. Running through the comparison chart between USC and UW should have made it a fairly easy decision:

• UW facilities compared to USC? They suck.
• Weather? Sucks.
• Recruiting talent pool? Sucks.
• UW talent on defense? Sucks.
• Future prospects for a winning season? Aaaaaannnnd sucks.

Then a funny thing happened. Nick Holt, who could also be mistaken for a matinee action hero, found 2.1 million reasons to LOVE … LOVE the University of Washington. Bling! For $2.1 million over three years, you can have pretty much any coordinator you want and the Dawgs got there guy. Good for them, they had to win something at some point. The law of averages demands such.

Here’s what the P-I quoted him as saying in his press conference early this week:

"(Washington) has awesome alumni. It has awesome tradition. It has awesome (fans) and this is a sleeping giant. I know Coach Sark can get this done and he's hiring the right guys and I wanted to be a part of that. So I'm so excited to be a part of that. The opportunity here is awesome."

We like Nick Holt for a bunch of awesome reasons:

1. He’s got one of those names that you love saying. You can’t just call him Nick or Holt. You have to say, Nick Holt. Nick Holt. Nick Holt. Nick Holt. Awesome.
2. He will probably scare the bejesus out of the UW defense. This is good because that squad was asleep the entire season. I mean how you can’t get fired up after a Tyrone Willingham pregame speech is a mystery.
3. From all reports, he’s a pretty damn good defensive coordinator and we’ll get to see just how good he is with a defense void of talent.
4. It’s easy to imagine him in a steel cage death match with Rick Neuheisel. I would pay good money to see Nick Holt drop a leg from the top turnbuckle. And for the right dollar figure, Ricky would agree to anything. Let’s make this happen.

As always, I reserve the right to bury Nick Holt after the season starts. But for now I think Nick Holt is awesome.