Washington is heading into its final week of spring practice, and Chris Petersen has admitted that the Huskies are behind.

But it’s not about the players. It’s part of moving to a new job. Petersen had been at Boise State since 2001, head coach since 2006, and Washington is his second head-coaching job.

“When you take a new job, it’s a combination of the situation,” Petersen told SiriusXM College Sports Nation. “My point was being it’s not on these kids that we’re set back. It’s on the old staff that left. It’s on us, the new staff coming in. Now we have a new way of doing things and a new system, so we’re behind.

“All of the teams that we’re going to play don’t have new staffs. They’re working their systems. They’re not diving into the details of everything. We’re putting in the basics. I just want the kids to understand the urgency of how important every meeting is, every practice is, because, technically, we are behind.”

This being Petersen’s first move from one head-coaching job to another, it has been a learning process to figure out how to handle the transition.

“I think we have to be smart,” he said. “Coaches want to go so fast. We want to scheme everybody up. We want to put 1,000 plays in. I think that’s a lot of the fun of coaching, who has the chalk last. It really doesn’t matter who has the chalk last if the kids don’t have a clue how to line up or we don’t have our fundamentals down. So it’s always a balance of all those things, of teaching the fundamentals.

“It’s fundamentals and details. We say that a million times. But you can confuse your kids with these details. Every play, to make it really successful, has to come with a lot of details. A lot of times, that detail can become a bunch of minutia, and they can’t figure anything out.”

The Huskies open the 2014 season at Hawaii.