The voice on Arizona Stadium’s public address speaker kept repeating itself: “Please remain off the field! Return to your seats! Please stay off the field!’’
And yet it was like a scene in “Animal House,” when the homecoming parade became chaotic and actor Kevin Bacon stood in the middle of a fun-loving mob saying, “All Is well! All Is Well!’”
Perhaps the PA man should’ve been using the same words Saturday.
There couldn’t have been more than 12,000 fans at Arizona Stadium when a fun-loving football mob rushed the field late Saturday afternoon. It seemed like 11,999 exorcised three years of frustration by hugging one another, exchanging high-fives with Arizona athletic director Dave Heeke and battle-scarred quarterback Will Plummer, who should receive football’s equivalent of a Purple Heart.
For 3½ hours, all was well with the long-suffering Arizona football program.
“This has been so hard,” said UA coach Jedd Fisch, his soaked game-day shirt a happy color of blue, the residue of the celebratory Gatorade shower he took at midfield. “It’s been a monkey on the back so hard that you can’t imagine.”
The record will forever show that Arizona has gone 1-20 in its last 21 games, but for at least 24 hours, or maybe a week, the “1” will be celebrated far more than the “20” will be remembered. In some ways, Arizona’s 10-3 victory over a COVID-19 impaired Cal roster was embraced the way the 2016 Cubs welcomed a long-sought World Series championship.
Beneath Fisch’s office window at the Lowell Stevens Football Facility, scores of UA fans walked slowly down Cherry Avenue and stopped, as if they weren’t ready to leave the scene of Arizona’s first football victory in 763 days. A line formed next to the Button Salmon statue as one group after another posed next to the bust of the Arizona QB who created the “Bear Down” legend 96 years ago.
Sometimes it seemed like it had been 96 years since the Wildcats had won a football game.
As the final seconds ticked off the clock Saturday, UA receiver Stanley Berryhill and linebacker Anthony Pandy finally carried off a douse-the-coach-with-Gatorade attack they had been planning for weeks, delayed week after week by soul-crushing losses to NAU, UCLA and Washington.
Arizona's Christian Young beams as he watches Wildcats fans rush the field following Saturday’s win.
Fisch needed the escort of two policemen to emerge from the midfield celebration to get to an end zone interview with the Pac-12 Networks.
When at last Fisch, his players and staff gathered in the boisterous locker room — “we were throwing water bottles everywhere,” said Berryhill, “we even broke a light” — Fisch presented game balls to seemingly everybody but Button Salmon.
Defensive coordinator Don Brown got one. Then every defensive player who played a snap got one. So did Plummer. So did field goal kicker Tyler Loop.
And then Berryhill walked up behind Fisch and presented the man charged to overhaul a broken football program a game ball.
Who would’ve thought Arizona wouldn’t have enough footballs for a post-game celebration?
“I’m going to take mine home and probably put it in a frame,” said pass rusher Jalen Harris, who is becoming a difference-maker in Pac-12 football.
No one in Tucson is going to buy into the excuse that it wasn’t fair for Cal to be expected to play a football game Saturday. True, the Golden Bears were down seven starters and 24 players for COVID-19 issues, but that probably just made it an even playing field.
If the Bears had just 50 Pac-12 qualify players available, it just about matched Arizona’s list of Pac-12 level players.
You say Cal QB Chase Garbers couldn’t play? Arizona was using a QB, Plummer, who had lost his job twice this season, to now-injured Gunner Cruz and Jordan McCloud, and had yielded maybe a third of the plays to a receiver-turned-QB, Jamarye Joiner.
It took 58 minutes to determine that Arizona was the better team. Some of it was as crazy as the “Animal House” parade.
When Cal’s Nick Lopez kicked a short field goal to tie the game 3-3, two referees tossed a penalty flag.
The refs waved to Cal coach Justin Wilcox, who hobbled onto the field, a boot protecting an injured right foot, the result of a recent surgery. That scene fit the game’s narrative as much as anything.
The refs asked: “Do you want to accept the penalty or get the ball back at the 11-yard line?’”
Wilcox appeared to break an NCAA record by saying no in what seemed like 0.7 seconds.
In Saturday’s game, three points were gold.
And wasn’t it appropriate that just as Wilcox hobbled back to the Cal bench, twice-injured Plummer returned from the UA locker room for a second time.
UA kicker Lucas Havrisik, right, celebrates the win with UA women’s basketball standout Sam Thomas.
Who wasn’t injured or unable to play?
At one point, Arizona used its fifth quarterback of the year, walk-on Luke Ashworth, the first time in modern school history it had used a No. 5 quarterback in a meaningful situation.
Both teams were forced to use walk-ons, third-stringers and true freshmen, turning centers into tackles and, in Cal’s case, deploying an emergency QB who played at Western Carolina in last spring’s unusual COVID-created spring football season.
And, almost predictably, the officials called a rare, double 15-yard penalty on the Arizona bench and Brown late in the fourth quarter for an insignificant bumping-into-the-referee call that was like giving a speeding ticket for driving 56 in a 55 mph zone.
It was an inartistic football afternoon, to put it politely. But in an Arizona sense, it came off as a work of art.
As Fisch completed his radio interview 30 minutes after the game, the freshly-showered Brown walked down a hallway full of boosters, donors and administrators. It seemed like every person in the corridor stopped Brown to give him a hug or shake his hand.
In a weird kind of way, it turned out to be one of the most enjoyable days in UA football history. A team that is 1-8 finally had the breaks go its way.
What goes around seems to come around in college football, even if it takes 30 or 40 years. In Dick Tomey’s first season as Arizona’s coach, 1987, the Wildcats played Cal at the Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium. Tomey’s starting QB, Bobby Watters, had broken his thumb and was out for the year. True freshman QB Ronald Veal, his replacement, injured an ankle and could barely walk.
So Arizona started All-Pac-10 safety Jeff Hammerschmidt at QB and toughed it out. Hammerschmidt ran for 110 yards and in the final minute, tied at 23-23, the Wildcats were inside the 30, in field goal range, killing to clock for what could’ve been a season-changing field goal.
But before they could kick that field goal, Hammerschmidt fumbled. Cal recovered and celebrated as if it had won the Rose Bowl.
“Maybe someday we’ll be good,” a downcast Tomey said afterward.
Now, after beating Cal to break a 20-game losing streak, Fisch can say the same thing with much more purpose.
