Here is a miserable exercise for UTEP football fans, but one they’ve grown used to doing every few years.
As the season hits the league portion of the schedule, coming off a demoralizing 33-7 homecoming loss to Oregon State where the offense looked lost and the defense only occasionally joined the battle, go through the next eight games and find the wins.
Next up is 3-1 New Mexico, a team that lost to Oklahoma (Sooners 51, UTEP 0) by a touchdown, a team that figures to be a three-touchdown favorite against UTEP and a team that figures to be in running for the group of six playoff berth.
change into UTEP breakthrough
Where is UTEP football team's next win?
The Miners can get used to being underdogs, the preseason over/under of 3.5 wins looks like a bad buy for anyone who has it.
Hawaii on Nov. 7 in the Sun Bowl? The Rainbow Warriors aren't good but they did beat a New Mexico State team that so far looks better than UTEP.
Nevada on Oct. 10 (next home game)? They are coming off a three-point loss to an Air Force team that looks to be 20 points better than the Miners.
But wait, skip ahead to the end, right there on Thanksgiving weekend against still-winless Northern Illinois. Yes, circle the trip to DeKalb on Nov. 28 as the next time UTEP won’t be a big ‘dog. Just remember, they are circling this date in Northern Illinois as well as the best chance to avoid 0-12.
That’s what passes for hope at this point after UTEP’s comprehensive burial at the hands of an admittedly good Oregon State team that could contend for the Pac-12 title with Boise State and could make some noise in the scramble for the group-of-6 spot in the playoff.
UTEP Miners didn't show up against Oregon State
Realistically, in retrospect, this wasn’t a game the Miners were going to win, but it’s one where they could have shown up.
Instead, they fell out of the gate and were out of it before the second quarter.
"I don't have a good answer for that right now," coach Scotty Walden said about the opening quarter. "I'm surprised. We came out with our hair on fire last week (at Michigan), we didn't do that this week. We had a great week of prep, I felt the guys were excited and ready to play, but for whatever reason we came out flat and gave up that first touchdown drive. ...
"We weren't playing with that same trigger we played with against Michigan."
Lack of pass protection, pass rush killed UTEP
Going through the specifics in a game where the beating was so general feels like an exercise in pedantics, but there are glaring places to start. Quarterback EJ Colson was sacked seven times and under siege all night. Of his 15 runs (this is unsustainable from the standpoint of his health) at least five were scrambles and at least three he needed Houdini escapes to turn a sack into a marginal gain, so the sack figure feels like it should have been double digits.
Before the season the fear was that a rebuild offensive line with four transfers and a freshman might not give Colson a chance and that's what happened against Oregon State.
"My o-line did their best," Colson said. "We're banged up there and at the end of the day I have to do a better job of getting the ball out of my hands quicker. I have to put them in a better situation, executing what I have to do and being a leader as a quarterback."
If there is hope here, it comes from that type of leadership in the locker room.
On the other side of the ball UTEP had zero sacks and two hurries on 34 Oregon State pass attempts. The sack numbers on both sides of the ball are losing numbers every time.
Troubling decision at end of first half, use of timeouts
Something that only affected three points in a 26-point game, but was also disturbing, was the sequence at the end of the first half. Thanks to some Beaver penalties UTEP moved to the 14-yard-line with 14 seconds left and a chance to cut into a 20-0 deficit.
Obviously the one thing the Miners couldn't take here was a sack, which obviously they did on a play when Colson didn't have much of a chance to dump the ball. At this point, UTEP might could have scrambled to the line and spiked the ball on second down with a second or two left to set up a last-play field goal, but there was no "might" on what they tried to do instead.
They ran a mayday field goal unit on to the field and weren't remotely close being lined up when the clock hit 0:00. That was potentially a three-point game management mistake.
So why didn't UTEP just call a timeout? Because, as has almost always happened this year, the Miners were out of them long before the 2 minute timeout. They called their third timeout of the first half with 6:04 left in the second quarter and that's a story in itself.
Drawing back on the Sean Kugler era, they used that final timeout on fourth-and-3 on their own 40 to discuss strategy. As it turns out, they called timeout to set up a punt from 5 yards further up the field than a delay of game would have left them. No team in America uses so few timeouts for clock management and so many to sort out confusion.
UTEP looked confused at a number of points in this game, but there is nothing confusing about the 1-3 record they have going into a game against their old rivals from New Mexico.
This is where the Miners are right now and it's not a good place.
Bret Bloomquist can be reached at bbloomquist@elpasotimes.com; @Bretbloomquist on X.
This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: Analysis: UTEP's bleak reality. Finding the next victory isn't easy
