Utah 52, UCLA 45
Pasadena, Calif. (Rose Bowl)
October 22, 2016
UCLA head coach Jim Mora
opening remarks
“It’s tough to win a game when you start with a kickoff return for a touchdown, you give up 360 yards rushing and only get 46, you have five turnovers, you kick the ball out of bounds right when you’re trying to get field position. Those are some really discouraging things. But I’ll give you a positive; I thought our young men, getting 14-0, coming off two losses, fought. There’s no quit in them. We’re not doing well enough, but it’s not for lack of effort on the part of our players. That’s not a winning formula, as I’ve said - giving up that many yards rushing, not being able to run, turning it over that much. The key thing for those young men is that they hang together, support each other, continue to search for answers and come out and work hard. Absorb the disappointment, but not let it affect them going forward. That’s what we’ll continue to talk about. Sometimes there are tough life lessons to be learned in athletic competition. Hopefully we can learn those lessons, and they’ll apply them somewhere down the road in their life, but right now it’s very, very painful for all of us.”
on going back to spread and if it will be their base offense going forward
“We haven’t been able to run the ball, which is no secret. I felt like we go up-tempo, try to open some things up for our backs, try to help our offensive line a little bit, see what we do going forward.”
on identifying the situation with the o-line to get the run game going
“We didn’t really try to run the ball today. We only attempted 10 runs.”
on the run defense
“It’s been so good lately. We got on the wrong side of some blocks, and that young man had a world-class day against us, and that’s disappointing because we have been playing the run so well. We were searching for answers on the field between series and between plays, trying to get ourselves on the right call. Sometimes you get out of rhythm. Our guys were playing so well on defense and today we weren’t able to sustain the success we’ve been having. It’s something we have to look hard at.”
on Mike Fafaul
“I think Mike is gritty as heck. He threw the ball 70 times today. He threw [five] touchdowns. He’s unaffected by his mistakes. He’s affected by them, but he keeps going out there and slinging it. His teammates have tremendous, tremendous, tremendous respect for him, and they want to play hard for him. He’s a warrior. He’s a stud of a kid. I have great respect for him.”
on if he’s ever been part of a game in which the team didn’t try to run the ball
“I’ve coached hundreds of hundreds of games. I came into the league with Don Coryell. There’s your answer. Your objective is to win. Whatever it takes to win. That’s what you have to be willing to do. We didn’t go into the game thinking we’d throw it 70 and run it 10, but we were moving the ball through the air, and our offensive line was doing an excellent job with protection. That defensive line came into the game as the No. 1 sack unit in the Pac-12 with 20. We called 76 passes, and they had 2 sacks. That’s a credit to our offensive line. We had five sacks on defense, but we couldn’t stop the run.”
on what was the biggest problem on the opening kickoff
“The kick. The kick needs to go deep left, the kick didn’t go deep left. They ran a bounce, we were closing down the right side, and they found a crease. It starts with placement of the kick. Simple.”
Utah head coach Kyle Whittingham
opening remarks
“Not our typical way of winning a football game. We don’t find ourselves in many shootouts. It was great to see our offense respond the way they did, defense struggled a little today against the throw game, but their run game was almost non-existent. It was almost like playing Washington State with almost 70 pass attempts which I think is what we had against us today. Defense had just enough in the tank to get that last stop that we needed. They did come away with some takeaways that we needed. We had four or five takeaways, four picks and a fumble, so five takeaways which was huge. Started fast, got jump started with that kickoff return. It was nice to see us get one of those right out of the gate and break loose with a kickoff return. Great job by Cory [Butler-Bird] and the kickoff unit blocking it up. Storyline of the game is the offense and how they kept moving the ball and kept answering every time UCLA scored we answered. Just a great performance by Joe Williams. He was on a pitch count. He wasn’t going to go above 30 carries, and we held him to 29 and he got over 300 yards. I can’t say enough about that young man and what he has meant to our team the last two weeks. What a blessing it is for us to have him back and how unselfish it was of him to come back. It was legitimate when he stepped away, he was really hurting. He did it for his teammates, he is an unselfish guy. We are elated to have him back.”
on mentality change for Joe Williams
“Well he did have a month off to kind of heal up and get some of the soreness out of his body. He’s just rejuvenated. I don’t really have a great answer for you other than he is not feeling perfect but he is still got some things that ail him. He has about 53 carries the last two weeks and that’s a huge workload for him.”
on big plays
“It’s awesome. We’ve had some pretty good running backs come through here and play against some inferior teams and have not been able to rack up the yardage like he did here today. To say that he broke the all-time record is really saying something. We’ve had some running backs go to the NFL that have done some really great things. So to run that well against a really good defensive team – and they are a good defensive team, they’ve put up some good defensive numbers. It’s a credit to the offensive line, it’s not just Joe. The offensive line worked their tail off this afternoon. We had just enough throw game to keep them honest. Last couple of years we’ve been a little bit too one-dimensional and weren’t able to open up the running lanes because we did not throw the ball efficiently enough. Now we are throwing the ball with much more efficiency.”
on offensive mismatches
“No, I don’t think so. There were no individual matchups, I just think our offensive line played well today. They have some really big kids up front. It was just our offensive line was able to work as a unit and that was great to see. That’s how we envision those guys would be able to be coming into the season that they would be one of the better offensive lines in the Pac-12.”
on UCLA’s offense gameplan
“There wasn’t much run game. I don’t know how many times they ran the football. Pure runs you can probably count on one hand, maybe two. But our defensive line responded to their run game. Pass rush wasn’t as good as it usually is, and the coverage wasn’t nearly as good as it usually is, but we had enough.”
on turnovers
“The turnovers made a huge difference. If we don’t get those we don’t win the game. Other than the final score, and I’ve said it over and over, the turnover margin is the most important stat and we were like plus-two or three which really helped our cause.”