Arizona’s win over Kansas State featured an entire season’s worth of emotions: anticipation, excitement, dread and relief. Indeed, UA fans experienced it all.
In the third quarter.
All jokes aside, Arizona’s victory over the lesser Wildcats showed not only that the team’s talent level is better than last year, but that it is much better coached. Both of those are important, but perhaps nowhere was the program’s growth more evident than in how it responded to adversity.
Facing challenges really for the
first time all season, Arizona responded in a way it either did not or could not last year. There are two specific examples and both came at different points in last weekend’s win.
When the second half began Arizona held a 17-3 lead and although Kansas State was getting the ball first, the home Wildcats were firmly in control of the game. Then on the first play from scrimmage, Kansas State got a 75-yard touchdown run.
Now up 17-10, Arizona was still fine. That is until a 3-and-out led to a botched punt that soon after led to another K-State touchdown. Now the game was tied. Arizona appeared to get back on track with a solid drive, but it ended with an interception — thrown by receiver Nunu Whatley.
The self-destruction was reminiscent of last season’s road tilt at BYU, which saw a 14-7 halftime deficit balloon to 21-7 just two plays into the second half after an interception and then 24-7 not long after following an Arizona fumble.
Yuck.
The Wildcats never recovered against BYU. But against Kansas State, they did.
“What I loved was, I loved the response, because we had two really ugly plays back to back, and then we responded,” Arizona coach Brent Brennan said about that sequence after the game. “We responded in all three phases there, and that’s that is what good teams do, is when something goes wrong, you respond, and that’s red line, and you saw it, and you saw it in the effort, you saw the execution, you saw the accountability.
“Because we screwed something up, and now we own it, fix it, and let’s play the game.”
The game featured another potentially devastating miscue.
Up six following a defensive stop in Kansas State territory, Arizona was one score away from essentially putting the game away. A short drive went nowhere and a 46-yard field goal missed, leaving the door open for the opponent.
A very similar sequence occurred last year against Texas Tech, when up one the Cats turned a fourth quarter stop into a chance to go up by more and make life real tough on their struggling opponent. However Tyler Loop’s 48-yard FG missed, and the defense proceeded to surrender a field goal eight plays later. T-Mac fumbled on the next drive, leading to another Tech TD, and that was essentially that.
A late missed field goal doomed Arizona against Texas Tech. But against Kansas State, it didn’t phase the team.
There were numerous other mistakes made by Arizona in this most recent game, and while all could have led to a loss that would have had us all saying something to the effect of “should have won that game,” none of them did.
You cannot point to any one reason as to why this year’s Wildcats have shown a toughness last year’s lacked. And indeed this was only one game against an opponent who is in the midst of a tailspin not unlike the one Arizona suffered through last season, so we may look back on this win a bit less fondly when the season wraps up.
But Arizona’s performance in this game, with all it included, was another sign that it is officially time to move on from last season and stop attaching its struggles to this year’s team.
Continuing about the rough second-half sequence against Kansas State, Brennan said his message to the team was to respond.
“What can we do in this moment,” he said. “Something bad happened, what can we do? How can we respond. I think that’s one of those things, it’s all part of our journey as a football team, and learning how to do that with consistency.
“Because every team you play is good enough to make a play, every team you play is good enough to beat you. And so how are you going to respond in the tough moments? That’s what gives you a chance to be a good football team, is your response in the tough moments. Do you respond with red line? Do you respond with effort? Do you respond with execution? Do you respond with accountability?”
Arizona did.
The roster Brennan and his staff have put together features a nice mix of young players along with program veterans and hungry transfers who are looking to prove themselves at this level. Winning plays have been made by a variety of players in each game this season, pointing to the kind of depth that has been assembled.
Arizona is going to face better teams than what it has so far this season and it’s likely there will be more mistakes, bad sequences and struggles. From what we’ve seen the Wildcats have enough talent to be competitive and, based on the win over Kansas State, the kind of mentality that will be necessary to navigate the Big 12 portion of the schedule.
