At precisely 9 a.m. Saturday, just beneath Rich Rodriguez’s office window, the Pride of Arizona began its final rehearsal for the Arizona-Colorado game.
About 200 band members and conductor Chad Shoopman literally worked until they got it right. They practiced until 12:30 p.m., at which time Shoopman gathered his band a few yards from the Lowell-Stevens Football Facility and exhorted them to make the most of a long day.
“We have a chance tonight to show thousands of people how great the Pride of Arizona can be,” he said into a microphone. “I expect your best.”
Shoopman blew his whistle and in unison the band chanted, “BEAR DOWN!”
The band was excused for lunch and a brief rest. By 5 p.m., in full gear, they were back on campus. They made music until midnight.
So not everybody in an Arizona uniform lost Saturday. The Pride of Arizona was excellent; RichRod’s football team lost its seventh straight game, 49-24.
It was the same sad song, second verse, same as the first.
The disquieting part of the whole exercise was that only about 18,000 people showed up at Arizona Stadium. Predictably, the UA inflated an announced attendance of 41,068 — the smallest of RichRod’s UA years — but at no time could there have been half that many in the stadium.
It was, I believe, an even a smaller audience than the 26,500 who showed up at Arizona Stadium for the Arizona-BYU game on Nov. 11, 1972.
As the fourth quarter began, the Pride of Arizona outnumbered the remaining students in Zona Zoo.
That’s how far Arizona’s football program has fallen.
Had not the UA’s College World Series baseball finalist been honored in the first half, there would’ve been no one in Section 1, ground level, adjacent to the north end zone. The baseball players and their entourage sat together in Section 1 during the first half. They all exited at halftime as CU led 28-10.
After that, crickets.
Arizona is threatening to become the first UA team to go winless in a conference season since the 1957 Border Conference, a 1-8-1 campaign in which the Wildcats finished 0-4 against a lineup of lightweights such as Hardin-Simmons and West Texas State.
Ordinarily, the UA’s final two games, at Oregon State and a Territorial Cup home game against Arizona State, would be encouraging.
The Beavers are on a 1-18 streak in Pac-12 games, and the Sun Devils have lost four straight, ranking No. 127 of 128 FBS teams in yards surrendered.
But when you commit six penalties for 62 yards in the first quarter as Arizona did Saturday — a period in which the Wildcats gained just 68 yards — you are on a treadmill to historic lows.
For some, it was a great day to be a four-letter word in college football. Pitt. Iowa. Or even a shorter version: USC.
Those teams bumped off the nation’s Nos. 2-3-4 teams on Saturday, but at Arizona the only four-letter word appropriate to football has become LOSE.
The UA’s best play on offense is a broken play, with quarterback Brandon Dawkins darting from side to side, running for his life (he gained 81 yards Saturday), or handing off to a former receiver, Samajie Grant, who has become Arizona’s most productive player, offense or defense.
That’s basically two against 11 football in a season in which almost nothing has gone according to plan for the Wildcats.
In the first half, for example, Colorado completed a 47-yard pass that reached Arizona’s 4-yard line. The Arizona defensive back against whom the pass was completed was Malcolm Holland.
Malcolm Holland?
He is a 24-year-old walk-on, a redshirt freshman who as recently as 2014 was playing second base for the Great Lake Loons of the Class A Midwest League, a Dodgers affiliate, where he hit .206.
From the Loons to the Wildcats. Doesn’t it seem fitting for a team that is 0-7 in the Pac-12 and has been outscored 316-130 by conference opponents?
Colorado doesn’t pass the eye test the way USC does, but the Buffaloes are 8-2 and should return to Boulder to overflow crowds as it finishes the regular season against Top 25 opponents Washington State and Utah.
It seems preposterous that exactly two years ago, Nov.13, 2014, Arizona was 8-2 and the Buffaloes were 2-8. Colorado would go on to finish 0-9 in the Pac-12, and the Wildcats would win the Territorial Cup and the South division championship.
Now everything has changed.
As Saturday’s game came to a merciful finish at 11:29 p.m., 14½ hours after the Pride of Arizona began its game-day rehearsal, the band played on.
The school’s football team was not dancing to the music.
