No. 13 Utah lost to No. 8 Oregon 35-6 Saturday afternoon at Rice-Eccles Stadium.
Kyle Whittingham recapped the second loss of the season for Utah (6-2, 3-2 Pac-12)
Below is a transcript of Whittingham’s postgame press conference.
KYLE WHITTINGHAM
Opening Statement…
“Not a lot of positives in that game for us. That’s as thoroughly and as soundly as we’ve been beaten in a long time, particularly at home. Give Oregon credit, they are a complete football team just like I’ve been saying all week long. Tremendous talent, size, quickness, athleticism, depth, both sides of the ball. They took it to us and we really didn’t get much done in any phase of the game. The two things we were emphasizing going in was to win the line of scrimmage and win the turnover battle and didn’t do either of those, among a lot of other things that we didn’t do. But again, they’re very deserving of their ranking. Got a ton of respect for what they’re doing up there. They took it to us today.
“We got to regroup, get back into the film room on Monday and figure out what our deficiencies were, which there appear to be a lot. We had a good week of preparation, our practices were really good last week, but we just couldn’t get anything going today. They ran the ball on us, Bo Nix, tremendous quarterback. I think he was 14 of 16 in the first half, I don’t know what he ended up but he’s throwing the ball nearly 80% completion rate. The backs run hard and physical. The line on both sides is really good. They’re really good and credit Dan Lanning for what he’s getting done up there.
“For us, I don’t want to say back to the drawing board but we got to figure things out. Good teams respond and we will respond. I’ve got a lot of players in that locker room that are very disappointed obviously. We got to come back. Sometimes you get knocked down on your butt in life and you got to pick yourself up and come back and regroup and just figure things out and get things going that next week. That’s where we’re at right now, we’ve still got a lot of football left. We’ve still got a full third of the season left sitting here at 6-2, which is everyone wants to be undefeated but we’ve won some big ballgames. Just a mystery as good as we played last week and as many plays as we made last week, to not be able to get much of anything going this week. A lot of that is Oregon, I don’t want to diminish what they did today at all. The score wasn’t indicative – the game was a mismatch. It was worse than what the score indicated. We’ve got to regroup, pick ourselves up and get back on track.”
On last time he felt this way defensively:
“Jeez, probably TCU (in 2010) in this stadium . As I was thinking after the game trying to recall an experience like that, that was probably it.”
On coming back from a tough loss:
“Well adversity and tough times like this reveal character and I believe we’ve got a lot of character in our locker room. A lot of guys that are very prideful and we’ll come back and respond and work even harder this week and work to get back on track. When you get beat like that you don’t want to go in and berate your team and browbeat them. What happened out there was enough. Got to let them know you still believe in them, which I do 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 challenge of number of injured players:
“Nobody cares if you’re injured. I never want to play that card. Whatever you got available, you got to figure it out and make the most of what you’ve got around. Certainly, we’re missing a lot of good players that we wish we had, but a lot of teams in the country are in the same boat. There is teams that are also missing a lot of players as well. Injuries are an unfortunate part of this game. My least favorite part of the game and the job is seeing these young men get hurt. But to answer your question, we got to make do with what we got.”
On turnovers:
“I’ll have to watch the film. I know we turned it over (two) times. I know on one interception the receiver stopped and took Bryson by surprise, was not supposed to stop on that. We’ve been doing a pretty good job taking care of the ball offensively all season long and it wasn’t … that’s not excessive but our margin for error, against a team like that you can’t come away on the negative side of the turnover ledger and that’s what we did. We’re minus-one.”
On tackling:
“Probably our poorest tackling performance of the season. Can’t say that for certain until we watch the tape but my guess is that’s what it’s going to turn out to be. We’d been an excellent tackling team up until this week. We’ve missed single digit tackles in I think all but one of our games this year and that’s really good. If you can be single digit misses, you’re really good.”
On whether they’ll learn about team’s resolve in how they play next week:
“Sure we will. We did that after Oregon State. There’s one team that’s going to go undefeated in a season, maybe not even one. Everyone’s going to be in that same situation, and you got to resolve and pick yourself up and just keep swinging.”
On why the run game was unsuccessful:
“Not winning the line of scrimmage. Them being more physical. We very rarely get out-physicaled but today we got out-physicaled at the line of scrimmage. If I had to say what was the single biggest problem in the entire game, that was it.”
On Bryson Barnes’ two interceptions:
“He’s a tough kid. One of them was definitely not his fault. He was caught by surprise by what the receiver did. Bryson Barnes is a competitor. He’s our guy and we believe in him and he’ll bounce back.”
On Oregon’s tempo:
“Not really the tempo, the quarterback was lights-out and the running game was strong. It wasn’t really the tempo that did us in, it was the lack of our physicality not matching their physicality. As mentioned, not tackling well enough, and Bo Nix being an extremely accurate thrower. I think he’s leading the nation and if not he’s up there close.”
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