New test for Mocs’ motto at Wofford
SPARTANBURG, S.C. — Sometimes the growth in potentially good football teams comes more from the games they are expected to win than the toss-ups.
Such is the opportunity this weekend for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
UTC moved into the Football Championship Subdivision rankings for the first time this season at No. 22 in this week’s coaches poll, its profile raised by a 47-24 beatdown of reigning Southern Conference champion Samford — which was ranked in both FCS polls at the time — last Saturday in Birmingham, Alabama.
Looking beyond this week, on the horizon for the league-leading Mocs (3-1, 2-0 SoCon) are five games in which four of the opponents currently have winning records and two are ranked. Those future Saturdays will certainly shape UTC’s season as its seeks its first playoff berth since 2016, but for the matchups to matter, the Mocs have to take care of business in games such as the one this Saturday at Wofford (0-4, 0-1).
“We know Wofford is just as hungry as we are to win the game,” senior cornerback Kam Brown said. “They’re on the same mission that we’re on, to keep winning and keep winning, so we know they’re going to be hungry and looking to dismantle the momentum we have going right now. We have to focus on one game at a time …. It’s been our motto, one week at a time, one practice, one game, and that’s what we’ve been doing so far, and I think it’s going to continue to work.”
Kickoff is set for 6 p.m. at Gibbs Stadium in Spartanburg, where the Mocs will be seeking to win for the fourth game in a row both this season and in the series with the Terriers, who currently lead 15-14 with a 9-4 edge at home.
“We’ve just got to focus on getting better every day, or it’s going to come back and bite us later in the season,” senior tight end Jay Gibson said. “We’ve seen that here the past couple of years, and this year I think we’re really focused on every day, every chance we get an opportunity to get a little better, we’ve got to do that because it’s not really about who you’re playing this upcoming Saturday as much as it is about being as good of a football team as you can be.”
The Mocs join a long line of teams that have used the “one game
at a time” motto, but the list of those that have delivered the intended results is a lot shorter. That’s because the concept is so much harder to manage than it is to say.
Just in the past couple of seasons at UTC, coach Rusty Wright’s teams have had their struggles looking ahead and eventually been bitten when it caught up to them. Even this season got off to a bad start — not only because it was a loss, but because of how it happened, with North Alabama winning after the Mocs started and finished poorly — and that has led to some of the optimism surrounding this UTC team to be of the cautious variety.
That’s fair, but a win this week against the Terriers means that UTC’s homecoming game next week at Finley Stadium will likely be a battle of ranked foes. Western Carolina will be the opponent, and the Catamounts (3-1, 1-0) — currently ranked 17th by media and 21st by coaches — are in a situation similar to the Mocs this week with a visit to The Citadel (0-4, 0-1).
Wright, now in his fifth season leading the Mocs, has had success in four meetings with Wofford (the three-game streak follows a 35-34 overtime loss in Spartanburg in 2019), but he was more focused this week on getting to the next day of practice as opposed to the games that lurk beyond Saturday.
“You have to take it one day at a time,” he said. “I don’t talk about those other things, we don’t mention those other things. This group has been OK about that the last two or three weeks, and you know, maybe they would have done it before we played The Citadel (a 48-3 win) knowing we had to play Samford the next week, but they didn’t, so hopefully they keep continuing to grow and handle their business the right way.”
During the preseason, numerous players talked about not getting ahead of themselves, knowing that hurt the Mocs in the recent past. For every solid victory in 2021, such as those at home against East Tennessee State and Furman, there were the opening and closing losses to Austin Peay and The Citadel — also at home. Last season, losing three of the final four games after a 6-1 start left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth and extended the run of playoff misses.
“You would hope that lessons are learned,” Wright said. “At the end of the day, we have to learn lessons in life, or you’re doomed to repeat them, and if they don’t learn from the first game (the loss to North Alabama), forget worried about last year and things like that — there’s one right there in color for them to see, and I can’t be the one in there beating my head on the wall and yelling and screaming at practice and during the game. If we’re mentally into it and we’re ready to go physically, we’ll be fine.
“I think these kids will respond and continue to respond the right way because they’ve started doing the right things.”