Hansen: Arizona Wildcats' rough stretch shouldn't come as a surprise

Five years ago this weekend, Arizona fired Mike Stoops. Are the Wildcats in a better position today?

Or worse?

“We have 28 guys on our injury report,” Rich Rodriguez said Monday. “And 18 of them are starters.”

Already this season, 12 first-time starters have worked their way into the UA lineup. The young man who started the season as the fourth-string quarterback, 17-year-old freshman Khalil Tate, might possibly be No. 1.

J.J. Taylor, we hardly knew ya.

Stoops or RichRod?

Did you ever imagine there would be a question about it?

Football in the Pac-12 has been so difficult for so long that Arizona’s decline is part of the natural order of things. More than anyone in the league, UA fans should’ve seen a combustible season coming.

Arizona’s next projected victory is Nov. 19 at Oregon State. By then it’s entirely possible the Wildcats will be 2-8.

Unless you are part of the league’s Big 4 — Oregon, USC, Washington or Stanford — almost nobody has been successful at what Arizona is trying to do: put together five consecutive winning seasons.

“It’s almost impossible,” former UA coach Dick Tomey said Monday. “But the fans think you should win every week.”

UCLA hasn’t had five winning seasons in succession since 1988. ASU? Not since 1989.

Outside of the Big 4, the only Pac-12 school to string five or more winning seasons together in the last quarter-century is Cal, 2002-09. Utah, a conference newbie, is working on a string of two.

The Utes should enjoy it while they can because sooner or later, something fully unexpected — many things fully unexpected — are apt to foul up the wiring.

Your quarterback will get hurt. And so will the No. 2 quarterback. You’ll have a bad recruiting year. Or two. You’ll lose a couple of close ones in the final minute. Your bye will come at the wrong time, or not at all. Someone will catch a Hail Mary against you. Instead of “missing” Stanford and Oregon in the league’s rotating schedule, you miss Oregon State and Washington State.

“Five years in college football is a long time,” said Tomey. “Just finishing .500 in the Pac-12 is very difficult.”

Tucson was blindsided by the decline and fall of Mike Stoops as much or more than the recent slippage under RichRod.

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After four years of hard labor, Stoops coached Arizona to successive records of 8-5, 8-5 and opened the 2010 season 7-1, rising as high as No. 9 in the Associated Press poll. Quarterback Nick Foles was a revelation; Stoops recruited so well that Foles was surrounded by a veteran group with playmakers Juron Criner, Brooks Reed, Earl Mitchell, Colin Baxter and Ricky Elmore.

He was finally over the hump.

And then someone blinked.

Arizona went 1-10 over its next 11 games. Stoops was fired at mid-season in 2011.

Maybe it was just the natural order of a mid-level Pac-12 program. Somebody dropped a pass in the end zone. A season-making upset over Oregon was flipped by a last-second overtime loss. Someone (Rob Gronkowski, anyone?) jumped to the NFL a year too soon.

It is easier to trace the decay of RichRod’s program. After getting significant mileage from Stoops’ leftovers, from Matt Scott and Ka’Deem Carey to Austin Hill and Jake Fischer, the Wildcats didn’t recruit effectively, especially defensively.

Surely RichRod could see the demise of his defense coming, knowing he had to change the personality of his defense and its staff. But after a Cinderella-type 2014 season — the fleeting Miracle of Scooby Wright — how could you fire defensive coordinator Jeff Casteel and his old school chums?

The ’16 Wildcats are paying the price for substandard letter-of-intent days of 2013, 2014 and 2015.

This isn’t new ground for RichRod. His three-and-out period at Michigan was probably accompanied by even more angst, generated by win-now-and-win-forever Wolverine fans. Tucson is a more forgiving football audience.

In public, RichRod continues to speak as if his troubles of are temporary.

“We’re going to get to the point eventually where injuries won’t matter (as much),” he said Monday.

He spoke bravely about the thin and undersized rotation of a few diehards on the defensive line, declaring “we’ll get to the point we’ll rotate nine or 10 (players) in the future.”

This season, his fifth, is a freebie for RichRod. It’s not unlike Tomey’s fifth Arizona season, when the Wildcats were fractured by a ridiculous series of injuries, falling to 4-7, creating the first cries for his scalp.

Behind the scenes, Tomey was quietly building the foundation of the nation’s best defense, Desert Swarm.

On Monday, 25 years after the Wildcats lost consecutive games 54-0 and 54-14, Tomey walked to RichRod’s campus office.

“They’ll be fine,” he said. “Nobody said this would be easy.”