Arizona isn’t ranked anymore, but it began the season in the Associated Press Top 25. That’s not a regular occurrence in Wildcat Nation, having happened only once before in this century.
Those kinds of expectations are often hard to live up to, especially when they’re not the norm.
“We haven’t had those kind of expectations coming into a season before, so we are definitely battling,” UA coach Brent Brennan said Monday, three days removed from a humbling 31-7 loss at Kansas State that ended the program’s record-tying 9-game win streak. “Just watching college football the last couple of weeks, I think there’s a lot of people dealing with managing expectations and playing to the level they’re capable of playing.”
Despite enduring an unexpected coaching change and the loss of some key players as a result, Arizona by and large appeared to come out of the chaos in pretty good shape. Yet through three games this fall the results have been less than stellar, even in the two wins.
Poor run defense, crippling penalties and an inconsistent offense have all contributed to the uneven start. Another contributing factor could be how Arizona’s players, particularly the ones who chose to return following the coaching change, have dealt with what is often referred to as the “outside noise.”
Brennan said it was a lot easier during his playing days to shield oneself from the critics, both good and bad. Not anymore.
“I think that’s hard for anyone to handle, a ton of praise or a ton of negativity, both can be dangerous for young people,” he said. “That stuff doesn’t ever get shut off for them, because it all comes directly to their phone. I said this a lot in my last job, back in the day when we played it might be in the news, but your college friends don’t read the newspaper, so they were going to give you a hard time about dropping a pass or missing the tackle.
“Now you drop a pass or miss a tackle, 10,000 people might blow you up on Twitter and say a bunch of really hard stuff to hear. And so I think that part of it, that’s part of their life that they have to deal with, and that we have to help them try and deal with.”
Brennan believes the team’s internal leadership can help get things back on track.
“I think we have great young people in that room, and I think that those are the ones that we’re going to lean on, because we’re going to need their best when the best is needed,” he said. “I think the expectations of the public … no one has higher expectation than the players and the people in the building for what we’re trying to do.”
Wearing a long-sleeved shirt adorned with this year’s team motto, ‘Redline,’ Brennan admitted that Arizona is still searching for its identity after three games.
“I think we’re still finding it,” he said. “You saw we’ve had moments of really good football in all three phases, and then we’ve had moments of not great football. So I think the consistency piece is really what we’re trying to achieve. And that’s up to me and the rest of the coaching staff to continue to kind of take advantage of this time we have this week and next week, to not only prepare for a very good Utah team on the road, but to also get our own stuff tightened up.”
As it’s a bye week, UA players had Saturday and Sunday off before returning to practice Monday. Brennan said they’ll workout Tuesday through Saturday before getting another two days off, during which he and his staff will hit the road for recruiting, then start preparing for Utah on Sunday.
Brennan said coaches will be checking out “a bunch of the important kids that we’re recruiting in this class,” as will he, though on Thursday night he’ll be catching his son’s game. Scotty Brennan is a senior quarterback at Los Gatos High School in northern California, and the Wildcats are 3-0.
“I’m excited about it, because I get to see my son,” Brennan said. “I missed the first three games.”