Four months ago and one week ago, the Arizona Wildcats reported to the Lowell-Stevens Football Facility for headshots.
Everyone was healthy and eager for the season to start. They were even fired up about practice, with the first one coming Aug. 5.
Four players spoke to the media that day: receivers Cayleb Jones and Nate Phillips, offensive lineman Carter Wood and linebacker Scooby Wright.
The luster from a stellar 2014 campaign, at that point, had yet to be lost.
“Nobody cares what you did last year; it’s what you did for me lately,” Wright said. “So that’s the way I look at it.”
Boy, was that a long time ago.
From Aug. 5 until Arizona’s Nov. 21 loss to Arizona State, there was no week off. The only Wildcats given a break were those who got hurt. And there were plenty.
During fall camp Wood — who was expected to compete for the starting job at center — suffered a foot injury and was forced to medically retire.
Wright missed 10 of 12 games, including the final seven, with knee and foot injuries.
The 12-games-in-12-weeks schedule proved to be a gut punch. Injuries ravaged the Wildcats in a 6-6 campaign, and now Arizona will play in the Dec. 19 New Mexico Bowl, the same bowl game it won in 2012 when Matt Scott was Arizona’s quarterback.
What have you done for me lately?
Well, for Arizona, what they’ve done lately, finally, is rest.
The Wildcats have spent the last two weeks relaxing with their families. Many went home for Thanksgiving weekend.
“Some,” coach Rich Rodriguez said, “had too much turkey.”
The week after that, championship week, Arizona watched as spectators as Stanford won the Pac-12 Championship against USC, a game the Wildcats played in a year ago.
That’s two weeks off, plus another two for New Mexico Bowl prep. The bowl in Albuquerque is one of the earliest of the bowl season.
So how was that much-desired time off?
Reggie Gilbert, a senior defensive end, lit up just thinking about it.
“Oh yeah, it was great,” Gilbert said. “Especially going 12 straight weeks. The last couple of weeks gave us a chance to get our legs right. Even before Game 1, we were in camp for a month. Coaches gave us time off, and I feel like it’s really going to pay off.”
Added Will Parks, a senior safety: “I didn’t know how bad I was hurting until the next week. I guess my adrenaline was pumping and things like that, but once I sat down for four days or so, it was like ‘wow.’ ”
Arizona exited Sun Devil Stadium with more injuries than when it arrived in Tempe. Not everyone is fully healed, and the concussed Anu Solomon and Samajie Grant have already practiced in a limited capacity. Wright, an All-American a year ago, is “full go” for the first time since fall camp.
Rest has been harder to come by for Arizona’s coaches.
Typically, bye week are spent recruiting, and so Rodriguez and his assistants had a lot of ground to make up.
Rodriguez flew out to Hawaii and Washington for visits with UA commits, then stopped all over Southern California to chat with Arizona commitments and targets for the 2016 class.
“It was important” to visit recruits, Rodriguez said.
It’s not over, either — Rodriguez and his staff will use Thursday as a full day of recruiting. Friday, a handful of recruits will travel to Tucson for official visits. Among them: four-star offensive lineman Michael Eletise, from Hawaii, the top commit in Arizona’s 2016 class; and top junior college linebacker Kapri Doucet, who the Wildcats offered over the break.
Cayleb Jones, Arizona’s lead receiver, spent the break traveling to Greenville, N.C., with his family to watch his brother, Isaiah — a receiver at East Carolina — play for the first time in college.
Now, Jones and his teammates are back, well-rested, ready to go.
“It was really different being without football,” Jones said. “But it’s good to be back in the swing of things.”
