Three times this week I replayed Kevin Sumlin’s audio interpretation of Arizona’s tortuous Territorial Cup loss to Arizona State.
“The biggest issue to me was the two turnovers,” he said. “Two turnovers on your side of the 50.”
That was it. I was struck by the brief finality of such a football fatality. Sumlin offered no excuse, merely stating fact. And, yes, he was fundamentally correct.
Those turnovers — a poorly thrown interception by Khalil Tate and a botched handoff between Tate and J.J. Taylor — were ruinous among a variety of late-game football sins.
Sumlin screamed on the sideline at the ASU game, but after losing to the Sun Devils, he showed no angst or remorse.
What you don’t hear or see in that tape is any sort of angst or remorse. Sumlin was as close to emotionless as a football coach could be after his team blew a 40-21 lead, finishing the season with a losing record and no bowl game.
In the brief time Sumlin has been Arizona’s football coach, he has been impenetrable. He has appeared cool, even detached, to many of those outside the massive Lowell-Stevens Football compound.
It’s as if fans care more than Sumlin cares. That’s surely not true, but that’s the body language displayed week to week.
When Dabo Sweeney became the coach at Clemson, he delivered a memorable introductory speech in which he demanded that everyone — the school, the community and the players — be “all in.”
Now you see the slogan “All In” everywhere at powerful Clemson.
Sometimes you wonder if Arizona is, too.
Over the last two seasons, the Wildcats averaged 43,438 and 42,632 at Arizona Stadium. That’s the smallest two-year total in Tucson since 1974 and 1975. That’s when the UA was in the WAC, and Tucson was half its current size.
Arizona’s football program needs a change. It needs a positive image and a force of new energy.
No one’s asking Sumlin, at 54, to drum up a different personality, or to be Dabo Sweeney, or even a cheerleader. But it would be nice if we knew he’s not just another riding-out-the-string rental coach in Act III who has already banked close to $45 million in his head coaching career.
A football-challenged school like Arizona hasn’t done well with by-the-book football coaches. It doesn’t need a fundamentalist. It has succeeded most with a fearless coach, a man with an indomitable spirit, a tenacious coach who understands — as Larry Smith and Dick Tomey did — that losing to the Sun Devils HURTS LIKE HELL AND WON’T BE TOLERATED, in capital letters.
Arizona experienced its most football success in the 1980s and 1990s, when its calling card was toughness and spine. That’s what the 2018 Wildcats lacked. They were soft. They seemed to play without the we’re-having-fun-out-here gene.
Sumlin’s debut at Arizona was equally uninspiring.
The Wildcats seemed fully unprepared to play BYU in the Sept. 1 opener and lost to a team coming off a 4-9 season, one that would finish 6-6 against mostly nondescript opposition.
Margin for error? Gone.
One of UA’s losses came against USC. Combined, the Trojans and UCLA were worse this year than any time since 1998.
A week later, Arizona mailed it in, sleep-walking through a humbling 45-18 loss at Houston. The UA was so hapless that it fell behind 31-0 in the first half against a team that has gone 8-4 in a bad league, losing to SMU, Temple, Memphis and a Texas Tech team that recently fired its coach.
After that, it became clear there was some type of dysfunction between Tate and the coaching staff. If you trained your eyes or binoculars on the sidelines, you noticed there was almost no in-game communication between Tate and offensive coordinator Noel Mazzone, and even less between Tate and Sumlin.
It’s not all on Tate, or even close. Given Arizona’s personnel shortcomings in the secondary and on both lines, I’m not sure Vince Lombardi could have coached the Wildcats to any better than an 8-4 record.
But 7-5 was surely realistic, even with so much drama surrounding the quarterback.
The Pac-12 was vulnerable on a historic scale. Combined, USC and UCLA were worse than at any time since 1998. The Pac-12 averaged a mere 6.4 victories per school. Since the NCAA approved 12-game schedules in 1998, the only season with a lower average was 6.0 in 1999.
And yet the Wildcats were unable to take advantage.
Did you ever read the old MAD magazine? Alfred E. Neuman’s mantra was “What, me worry?”
That would be a good tagline on Arizona’s 2018 football season.
It would be nice to know a loss to the Sun Devils, or a 5-7 season, gave the coach as much agony as it did to the guy sitting in Section 18.
That doesn’t mean Sumlin needs to regularly visit the Boys Club, speak to the Rotary Club or ride up front at the rodeo parade. But it would be nice if Tucsonans could be confident that the football coach bleeds red and blue, too.
