A crushing loss — and a right to be angry about it
There is no rising without setback. The more the UConn football team improves, the more its games start to matter, the greater the risk of heartache.
So if UConn began to shake fans out of their apathy with two wins in a row and raise hopes, that meant disappointment was in the offing, and this came Saturday in Muncie, Ind. The other cleat dropped with an 11-point lead and the .500 mark close enough to sniff. The Huskies faltered and frittered away the game 25-21 at Ball State.
It was a gut punch for a team that was earning the right to feel good about itself, and must now pick itself up, dust itself off, you know how that goes.
“I’m going to tell ya, this was
severely disappointing,” coach Jim Mora said. “This is the most disappointing loss of the year, we had a chance to go to 4-4, get to .500 for the bye [week]. We
didn’t get it done. There are a lot of guys hurting in the locker room, but we’ll bounce back.”
UConn moved the ball impressively in the first half, on the ground and through the air, the most effective stretch of throwing so far by Zion Turner. After his two TD passes and Robert Burns’ rushing touchdown, the Huskies had a 21-10 lead at the half.
But in the second half, UConn sabotaged itself with a series of mistakes, something that hadn’t been happening. Penalties, turnovers, bad decisions, the Huskies were shut out in the third and fourth quarters, put their defense in untenable positions, and it eventually caved. Another injury, to linebacker Ian Swenson, didn’t help.
“... Especially, when you’re that close,” Burns said. “We’ve got to find ways to finish a game, and not let up. Keep attacking.”
There were 12 penalties, for a team that had only been averaging five per game. Turner’s interception with a chance put the game just about out of reach at the start of the third quarter, turned the game around and Victor Rosa’s fumble, marring an otherwise excellent effort from the freshman from Bristol, set Ball State up for a crucial fourth-quarter score.
Burns had one of the penalties, a hands-to-theface for 15 yards. There was an unsportsmanlike conduct that got Jelani Stafford ejected on the winning touchdown, and ended up pushing the Huskies back to their 15 to start their last possession. There were two illegal-receiver-downfield calls that negated UConn gains and help keep momentum drifting the wrong way.
“One of the things was a composure thing,” Mora said. “It’s hard to ignore the fact the last one [on Stafford] was a composure thing. Penalties are the result of a lot of things, getting out of position where you have to hold or grab somebody in coverage, you haven’t had your eyes or feet in the right spot. Sometimes its a function of getting beat and trying to recover. Sometimes its a lack of focus at that moment. It’s a lot of different things and we have to go back and analyze every single one and fix it. We can’t say, ‘we’ve only averaged five a game so this is an anomaly.’ You say it’s anomaly, it’s going to happen again, and we’re not going to accept that.”
UConn (3-5) has two weeks to salve the wounds, emotional and physical, from this loss, then has four games to play, Boston College, Liberty and UMass at home, and Army on the road. A victory Saturday would have opened up the possibility of a winning record and maybe some hope for a bowl invitation. Now, the Huskies can realistically hope two win some more games and come out of Mora’s first season with real steps forward, but nothing miraculous.
“It’s not the results we want,” Burns said. “Go back to work.”
We’ve learned this much about them: They will keep fighting, and are capable of competing with most of the teams on their independent schedule, they just didn’t finish the job this time. UConn’s defense came up with several big plays, sacks, an interception, a blocked field goal, in a desperate attempted to hang on, but they were asked to come up with too many.
So there they were, in another position few expected to find the Huskies: dealing with a loss in a game that — keeping in mind these things are relative — actually mattered. Things have improved this much, they have earned the right to be surprised, disappointed, angry after a loss like this. What could once be accepted, or just shrugged off as another bad Saturday can no longer be.
“I’m concerned about our football team and the way we performed,” Mora said. “As a coaching staff, it was not good enough, it was not acceptable and it will never be acceptable . ... It’s not okay to come close, it’s not okay to just keep fighting. We’re here to win football games.”