McC-Owned: A Scandurro Story

BY TIM SCANDURRO

“We’re in hell right now, gentlemen, believe me.  And we can stay here and get the sh!t kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back into the light.  We can climb out of hell, one inch at a time.” –Al Pacino, Any Given Sunday

UTSA’s Owen McCown had a night to remember against Tulane Thursday night, going 31-33 for 370 yards and four touchdowns.  He was accurate and decisive, but he might have completed 25 or 30 of those balls even if he hadn’t been.  That’s how poor our pass rush and coverage was.  We missed a ton of tackles as well and were uncharacteristically soft across all three levels.

 “Soft” is the dirtiest of dirty words for players and coaches to hear about their team, but it’s hard to think of a better one.   For several games this year where we played sloppily or lost focus, we at least could hang our hats on being gritty and tough.  It’s hard to be gritty and tough when you’re down 31-6 in the second quarter, and the one guy I’m confident would have demanded that from his teammates missed his second straight game with an injury. 

Offensively our surging passing game receded courtesy of a schizophrenic performance from our quarterback and offensive line.  Pressured repeatedly, Jake Retzlaff lost his poise and threw a couple of interceptions to go along with a number of other missed throws.  I ran into Joe Craddock a few days after the Army game and asked him about Jake’s early fourth quarter interception in that one.  “You can’t throw the seam ball against a Cover 2 look,” he said.  “You just can’t.”  When Jake threw his second interception in the Alamodome against the exact same look, his night was over.  The clock abruptly struck midnight on the Late Game Magic Man, who never even made it to the fourth quarter.

It’s never good after a game when you hear half the fan base saying the coaches are making the players look bad, and the other half saying the players are making the coaches look bad.  When you have a game where so many things go wrong, there is never a shortage of fingers to point when assigning blame.

It's a football truism that if you have to talk repeatedly about how there’s no such thing as an ugly win, you’ll eventually have to talk about an ugly loss.  Tulane’s performance in San Antonio Thursday night was worse than ugly.  It was the kind of effort  that got both a head coach and an athletic director fired in Baton Rouge last week (that score was 49-25; this one was 48-26).  The pitchforks, predicably, are out.

Coach Sumrall knows the business.  He’s often said that the same people who pat you on the back when you win will knife you in the back when you lose.

Yet I’m not sure he has actually experienced that at Troy or at Tulane the way he will this week.  Losses here to bigger conference schools were either more competitive (Kansas State, Oklahoma) or could be chalked up to resource disparity (Ole Miss) or resource disparity coupled with roster upheaval (Florida).  The league loss to Memphis last year was thorough but more competitive, and the loss to Army in the championship game—the one that felt most like this one, to me—could at least be attributed to a historically good Army team playing at home in frigid conditions.

None of those excuses can be used for Thursday night’s performance.  Our team was just soundly beaten both schematically and physically in all three phases.  With the exception of a Jimmy Calloway sighting (finally) and a goal line fade to Tre Shackelford (finally), there wasn’t anything to like except the final whistle. 

This game in San Antonio was supposed to be a statement game.  It turned out to be one, but the statement was “You’re not good enough, you’re not smart enough, and you’re not tough enough.”  Where to now?

Could we gain redemption against Memphis next Friday, and stay alive for the conference title?  Of course we can; heck, UTSA got beaten 55-17 the game before we saw them and they responded.  Will we? 

Last year I wrote a column on the redemption opportunity we had against Army in December, coming off a disappointing loss to Memphis.  Instead the wheels came off the wagon.  That’s a very real possibility next week against a team that is far more talented and capable than the one that just ran us out of the building Thursday night.  So no grandiose predictions this time.  Talk is cheap.  Results, though, have to be earned.

When Rick Jones was having rough seasons late in his tenure as our baseball coach, he would often say things like “I will never let this happen again” or “things are going to change around here.”  When things didn’t change and it happened again, year after year at the end, it eventually broke him. 

Our football coach is also not one to sit back and accept what we saw this week. He’s got some tough decisions to make this week and in the off season, and he will attack those decisions the way he attacks everything else.   Hard.  The pillars of his program are showing some cracks right now, but don’t count him out.  Wounded lions can be dangerous.

But this was a shockingly bad result we just had.  After that performance, I don’t know very many people who expect a  well-oiled machine to take the field at the Liberty Bowl.   But we damn sure have a right to expect that the physicality, toughness and grit will be back. 

Here’s a silver lining.  Remarkably, given some of the results of other G-6 games this weekend, we are still very much alive and the candle is still lit on all of our goals.  Flickering, but not out.

We’re at a fork in the road here, and this is going to go one of two ways.  Football is a painful sport to play, especially eight games into a season.  Everything hurts.  Accepting failure and quitting is the easy way, the common way, the way we saw so many Tulane teams go late in seasons past.  Getting better at this time of year is harder because it takes effort,  strength,  a willingness to coach hard and accept hard coaching, and most of all pride. 

Take the road less traveled next week, Greenies, and this too shall pass.  But you have to want it, prepare for it, and go get it.