No. 13 Utah lost to No. 8 Oregon 35-6 on Saturday afternoon at Rice-Eccles Stadium.
Kyle Whittingham recaps Utah’s second loss of the season (6-2, 3-2 Pac-12)
Below is a transcript of Whittingham’s post-match press conference.
KYLE WHITTINGHAM
Opening speech…
“There weren’t many positives for us in this game. This is as thorough and as solid as we’ve been beaten in a long time, especially at home. To Oregon’s credit, they are a complete football team, just like I’ve been saying all week. Tremendous talent, size, speed, athleticism, depth, both sides of the ball. They did it to us and we didn’t really do much in any phase of the game. The two things we emphasized early on were winning the line of scrimmage and winning the turnover battle, and we didn’t do any of those, among a lot of other things we didn’t do. But here too they absolutely deserve their ranking. I have a lot of respect for what they do up there. They brought it to us today.
“We need to regroup, get back in the film room on Monday and figure out what our shortcomings were, of which there are obviously many. We had a good week of preparation, our training was really good last week, but today we just couldn’t get anything going. They ran the ball on us, Bo Nix, great quarterback. I think he was 14 of 16 in the first half, I don’t know what he ended up doing, but he shot the ball with a completion rate of almost 80%. The back runs hard and physically. The line on both sides is really good. They’re really good and give Dan Lanning credit for what he’s doing up there.
“For us, I don’t want to say go back to the drawing board, but we have to figure things out. Good teams react and we will react. I have a lot of players in the dressing room who are obviously very disappointed. We have to come back. Sometimes life gets turned upside down and you have to pick yourself up, regroup and just figure things out and get going the next week. We’ve just arrived there, we still have a lot of football ahead of us. At 6-2, we still have a full third of the season left, which means everyone wants to stay undefeated, but we’ve won some big ballgames. Just a mystery, as well as we played last week and as many plays as we did last week, we couldn’t get much of anything going this week. A lot of it is Oregon, I don’t want to diminish what they did today at all. The result was inconclusive – the game was a mismatch. It was worse than stated in the review. We need to regroup, collect ourselves and get back on track.”
Last time he felt like this defensively:
“Gosh, probably TCU (in 2010) in that stadium. As I thought after the game and tried to remember such an experience, that was probably it.”
After a heavy defeat:
“Well, adversity and difficult times like this show character and I think we have a lot of character in our locker room. A lot of people are very proud and we’re going to come back and respond and work even harder this week and work to get back on track. When you get hit like that, you don’t want to insult and intimidate your team. What happened out there was enough. I have to let them know that you still believe in them, what I believe in them, I believe in the coaches. It’s one football game, we don’t want to overreact, but we didn’t play very well.”
On the question of the number of injured players:
“Nobody cares if you’re hurt. I never want to play this card. Whatever is available to you, you need to figure it out and make the most of what is available to you. We are certainly missing a lot of good players that we would like to have, but many teams in the country are in the same boat. There are also teams that are missing a lot of players. Injuries are an unfortunate part of this game. My least favorite part of the game and the job is watching these young men get hurt. But to answer your question, we have to make do with what we have.”
Regarding sales:
“I have to watch the movie. I know we turned it over (twice). I know the receiver stopped on an interception and caught Bryson off guard, but he shouldn’t have stopped. We did a pretty good job offensively all season and it wasn’t… that’s not an exaggeration, but our margin for error, against a team like that you can’t come away on the negative side of the turnover book and that’s what we did. We’re minus one.”
To cope:
“Probably our worst duel performance of the season. I can’t say for sure until we watch the tape, but I suspect it will happen. Until this week we were an excellent tackling team. I think we’ve missed single-digit tackles in all but one of our games this year, and that’s really good. If you can get single-digit errors, you’re really good.”
On whether you’ll hear about the team’s determination in their style of play next week:
“Of course we will. That’s what we did after Oregon State. There’s a team that goes undefeated in a season, maybe not even one. Everyone’s going to be in the same situation and you have to make a decision, pick yourself up and just keep going .”
Why the running game was unsuccessful:
“Not winning the line of scrimmage. They are more physical. It is very rare that we are physically overwhelmed, but today we were overwhelmed to the limit of combat. If I had to say what was the biggest problem in the entire game, that would be it.”
On Bryson Barnes’ two interceptions:
“He’s a tough kid. One of them definitely wasn’t his fault. He was surprised by what the receiver did. Bryson Barnes is a competitor. He is our man and we believe in him and he will get back on his feet.”
On Oregon’s pace:
“Not really the tempo, the quarterback was all out and the running game was strong. It wasn’t really the pace that bothered us, it was the lack of physicality that didn’t match the physicality of the players. As mentioned, he wasn’t good enough in tackles and Bo Nix was an extremely accurate thrower. I think he’s leading the nation, and if he’s not, he’s pretty close.”
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