GLENDALE — After an offseason of mysterious schematics, questionable depth charts and coaching overhauls, Arizona finally cut the ribbon and debuted its defense.
In the first half, on a third-down play, Arizona trotted out one defensive lineman and a whole bunch of linebackers and defensive backs. The first sack of Arizona’s young season came thanks to Carrington Vaughn, a walk-on linebacker from Pittsburgh in the first college football game of his life.
That was the beginning.
What have you done for me lately?
At the end of the game, after UA quarterback Anu Solomon failed to convert a two-point conversion following a long Nick Wilson touchdown run, Arizona’s defense was worn down by BYU’s running game, a pound-it-down-your-throat, try-and-stop-us-style.
The Cougars covered 53 yards in a little over a minute, capped by a 33-yard field goal from Jake Oldroyd to win the game.
The middle part tells a different story than the ending, of a defense that held its own for most of the night, that — at least, in one game — showed that it won’t be bullied like it was last season.
“I thought they played well enough for the majority of the game,” UA coach Rich Rodriguez said. “Particularly with a new scheme and being a little undersized, but (the defense) gave us a chance to win the game.”
It was the defense that held the Wildcats together for most of the game, not its stagnant offense. If anything, the offense made it harder.
The Cougars won the time of possession battle by 15 minutes, and Arizona’s offense only had two drives all night last longer than 3:04.
Of BYU’s first six possessions on offense, all but one drive lasted more than eight plays and four of them were for longer than four minutes. The Cougars two touchdown drives lasted 11 plays and 10 plays.
It wasn’t anything we hadn’t seen before, but they have some good athletes,” said BYU quarterback Taysom Hill. “We adjusted really well.”
Still, somehow, Arizona’s defense put together its two best defensive possessions at the end of the game.
As the Wildcats started a comeback effort, scoring a touchdown with 9:33 left in the game, Arizona’s defense came right back and held BYU to a three-and-out, and all the Cougars could muster was a three-yard loss.
On third down, Parker Zellers pointed to the crowd, Paul Magloire jumped and raised his arms, Sani Fuimaono clapped his hands toward the crowd, everybody on the defense was trying to pump the crowd up. Anthony Mariscal, in his first ever college football game, thrust into a prominent role when Tellas Jones left with an injury in the first half, jumped and clapped, then proceeded to initiate contact on hit, and Fuimaono came in for the kill.
Of course, the defense was off the field for less than a minute before Solomon threw his second interception of the night, and still, the Wildcats came back and held the Cougars to 11 yards on seven plays in a 2:48 stretch, which led to Wilson’s 49-yard touchdown run.
At the end of the game, though, the final score said 18-16, and Arizona lost.
“We didn’t win,” said Magloire, who led the Wildcats with 10 tackles and two tackles for loss. “So we could’ve played better.
It certainly wasn’t all pretty for the defense — Arizona’s undersized defensive line didn’t generate much of a pass rush, and tackling was an issue with BYU’s 6-foot-2, 220 pound running back Jamaal Williams, who amassed 162 rushing yards on 29 attempts.
“The tackling was poor,” Rodriguez said. “I was concerned about that. When you’re playing a big running back, you’re worried about tackling, but they played hard.”
That last part — BYU only scored 18 points on this defense, a unit that only held a team below 30 points in 2015 three times — against Northern Arizona, Nevada and Oregon State. Not exactly a murderer’s row.
A season-opening loss is never ideal, of course. It’s Rodriguez’s first non-conference loss since he became Arizona’s head coach, in fact.
But it’s something, defensively, to work with — if Arizona’s defense was a blank canvas coming in, at least now there’s a paint brush, with some colors to use.
“The first game,” Rodriguez said, “there’s a lot of things you gotta fix.”
