Throughout Washington's climb toward a berth in the College Football Playoff, coach Chris Petersen and his players betrayed almost no notice of the chaotic ebbs and flows of their sport.

The rankings, the hype and the endless debates all fell into the category of "outside noise," which apparently operates on a college football team like sunlight to a vampire.

On a sunny day in mid-October, however, Washington's affable, 321-pound defensive tackle Elijah Qualls took a break from bonding with his pet husky and admitted that, yeah, he had leaned forward to watch highlights of top-ranked Alabama a few times.

"The pure competitor in me pays attention to them," he said. "Alabama is the best and has been the best for quite some time. I want to beat the best."

This might sound like a player's version of "We want Bama!" What it also suggests is that the Huskies are not that shocked that on Dec. 31 they will, indeed, get the Crimson Tide in the College Football Playoff semifinal at the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl.

Washington is unquestionably the outlier in the CFP.

No. 3 Ohio State and Alabama have won the first CFP national championships. No. 2 Clemson battled Alabama deep into the fourth quarter of last season's final. All three began the season ranked in the top six of both major human polls.

Washington entered the season ranked 14th in the AP poll. While it was celebrated as a potential "surprise" team in the Pac-12, it was coming off a 7-6 season and hadn't been nationally relevant since 2000.

Yet here they are, in Petersen's third season after he left Boise State, two major upsets away from winning the program's first national title since 1991.

Washington is building a foundation to become a regular player in the College Football Playoff. Douglas Stringer/Icon Sportswire

Just because the Huskies' first rule about the playoff was they don't talk about the playoff doesn't mean they weren't enduring bloody, bare-knuckle practices away from the spotlight in order to get to the playoff.

"From the second that we came here, I think everybody really envisioned being good," Petersen said. "It took us a minute to get there and that was about as frustrating as anything any of us had been through, but that's part of the process."

Ah, the "process." That's Nick Saban's term, but Saban admits he learned more than a bit of it from Don James, which is where our story turns to the glorious history that hangs over the Huskies, both as a bright light for nostalgia and a tenacious haunting. James, sometimes affectionately referred to as "The Dawgfather," built a West Coast superpower at Washington, mostly displacing USC atop the Pac-10. After, yes, two middling years of struggle, he led the Huskies to six Rose Bowls and an Orange Bowl over a 16-year span.

Since James retired, Washington has been to just one Rose Bowl, in 2001, under Rick Neuheisel.

The internal debate among Washington boosters through the years has been whether the program needed a James-like disciplinarian (Jim Lambright, Keith Gilbertson, Tyrone Willingham) or someone younger and hipper (Neuheisel, Steve Sarkisian).

Dick Baird coached under James and Lambright and has been a longtime Washington football commentator. Since Petersen arrived, Baird has been allowed in team meetings and he has observed closed practices.

He begins by calling the comparisons of James and Petersen "unfair" but then makes a pretty good case for pursuing them.

"[Petersen and his staff] are so fundamentally oriented, more than any system that's been here since Don's," Baird said. "They cover all the tiny details on a regular basis. I love to just watch them work. These guys have a system and they go about it on daily basis. What they do is so totally improved over the past five administrations we've had here. It's no wonder to me why they are having success. Petersen is a hell of a coach. He's just like Don."

James could be fearsome to his players while coaching from his tower, and Baird noted that Petersen is more hands-on and less intimidating. Still, the modern term "players' coach" often extended to Petersen doesn't diminish his overriding authority.

As Baird explained, "They do smile, and they have wonderful senses of humor, but when they walk into the room, the kids stop talking. You know what I mean? There are a lot of parallels [with James]."

Even with Petersen potentially finding his groove in year three, more than a few observers were skeptical about Washington in the preseason, particularly and most vociferously Oregon fans. Some in the media looked at a depth chart that featured just six seniors and nine sophomores and speculated the Huskies were the proverbial "year away." After all, even with Petersen at the helm, the Huskies had gone 0-4 against the Ducks and Stanford -- which combined had owned every conference crown since Pac-12 expansion -- including blowout defeats to each.

This season's schedule helped get things rolling. If the Huskies needed to gain some confidence in the early going, outscoring a weak nonconference slate 148-30 probably inspired some swagger. A lackluster overtime win at Arizona showed the Huskies could scrap and claw on the road and survive when little was going well. Blowout wins over Stanford and Oregon caught the nation's fancy and established the Huskies as Pac-12 front-runners.

Washington emerged as an elite, dominant team, whether it was ahead of schedule climbing the college football pecking order or not. It ranked among the top seven in the nation in scoring offense and scoring defense, as well as in efficiency ratings on both sides of the ball. Despite the growing national attention, and even after the loss to USC on Nov. 19, Petersen maintained his team's equilibrium.

"Your team is different all the time," he said. "Your team is different after every game, win or lose. I think it's very important for coaches to pay attention to that."

Long-suffering and even skeptical fans jumped on the bandwagon. Attendance perked up. While going from an average of 61,919 fans in 2015 to 64,589 this fall doesn't seem extraordinary in a recently renovated Husky Stadium that seats 70,083, it's notable that Stanford and USC both attracted overflow crowds of 72,000-plus.

"It's not only excitement for the current year we're in," said Washington athletic director Jennifer Cohen. "It's, 'OK, we're back, and we've got the right guy and this program is on an incredible path.' It's not just this year. It's about what the future looks like, as well."

Cohen said booster interest has been stirred and donations are up. She also noted the synchronicity of the athletic department launching a new "The Game Changer Campaign" this year.

"Everybody says the same thing: 'What can we do to support Chris Petersen?'" she said.

That starts with securing Petersen well into the future. In early November, the Seattle Times reported that Washington was working on a new contract extension that could be for as long as 10 years, though Petersen later took vehement issue with the reported length. Cohen would only say talks are ongoing.

The immediate issue, of course, is Alabama. Petersen joked -- yes, he can do that -- about scrimmaging with the hometown Seattle Seahawks as preparation, before returning to his standard "It's always about us" response.

The future issue is sustaining excellence, as James did and no other Huskies coach has since he retired before the 1993 season. That's about accumulating talent. The Huskies are presently ranked 17th in ESPN's recruiting rankings, a notable uptick from Petersen's last two classes, which ranked 28th and 29th (though Petersen reserves his most demonstrative smirks for recruiting star ratings).

"To really get the flywheel turning on [recruiting], you've got to win for a while," Petersen said. "Guys have got to see you winning for years. They've got to see you winning for a long time."

Alabama is the model for winning for a long time, and Washington is going to get its matchup with Bama as a two-touchdown underdog.

The larger question going forward is whether the Huskies can maintain a seat at the table with the Crimson Tide and other college football superpowers.