Driving through rural Morocco…

Yep, and 2 of those 3 losses should never have been close to begin with. I don’t know why we play down (and up) to our opponents but it’s been happening for years, which tells me it’s the coaching.

I love Whitt and I don’t think we could do better but I’m starting to wonder if we have hit our ceiling. 8 or 9 win seasons with a trip to the Vegas or Foster Farms Bowl.

I think we saw a full team breakdown yesterday..even more than in the Cal game. I sit with a large number of people who’ve all had season tickets around me for the last 10 years and we all agreed starting about the 3rd drive in the first quarter that the team didn’t seem to be UP for the game. There wasn’t the wild energy with the team and the crowd reflected it…or perhaps there wasn’t that much crowd energy and the team reflected it. That being said…our D seems to feed (or starve) on crowd energy. The Offense…not as much. This seems to be consistent across games.

On offense…our O scored 21 points against the PAC’s crappiest D…execute was iffy and play calling was at best “vanilla”. I think I saw 2 plays that made me think the OC was even awake. We did get yards…MORE THAN ENOUGH yards to expect 35+ points…

On D…I got nothing. We gave up 575 yards to the ducks…and let them score TDs on 4 consecutive drives in the 4th Q when everyone knew we needed to hold. They knew…and they didn’t execute. But what’s odd is they didn’t look that tired. It looked like we weren’t making adjustments.

No sacks in the second half (correct me if I’m wrong here). And while I didn’t think we’d hold the Ducks to zero points we did hold them to 3 points for a goodly time…then just fell over and went home.

Oregon did not play inspired ball …they still looked pretty crappy (outside of Freeman)..in fact it reminded me a lot of the AZ game from a year ago when their RB single-handedly spanked us… I saw Allen and Thomas give up on plays and pull back on tackles..

And I just start smacking myself in the head when I think about our tackling the entire game.

This was a team (us) that came in and played another team that DID NOT look good. And we spotted them 575 yards while we repeatedly choked whenever we’d cross midfield.

Were we lookng past them Oregon (WHO THE HELL DOES THAT???) or were we hung over from a party at a strip club the night before? Did the Coaches say spend our game watching the CU game? I don’t know. But we continue to see this same s**t every November. We ARE a better team and we show it when we show up…but all 3 losses were conference losses and 2 of the 3 are unforgivable and…frankly…unexplainable except that in both cases the D isn’t as good as it used to be and the O …is not producing at a level one would expect for the talent we appear to have…

Chris Hill needs to look at our Assistant Coaches and remind Kyle that while he is really a solid coach that is a solid get for Utah…we are note a friends and family employment program. We’re here to win..this is a money making and promotional venture for the U of U (as much as its a game it’s moreso a business these days) and Kyle needs to understand that at a level I don’t think he’s done so far.

Oregon beat us. The refs helped but only because we didn’t show up. I am not saying we beat ourselves…their coaches did a better job of taking their team and motivating them and scheming for this game than ours did. Then their kids decided they could win in the 4th quarter and they made the plays. While we didn’t.

Pattern…yep. And I’ll be shocked as hell if we win next week because I think Colorado wants this win bad…and they are playing with heart.