After watching the Cal game tape, Alex Wujciak and the Terps realized exactly what went wrong.
It’s always interesting when the Terp football team is forced to talk at length about a disconcerting loss as was the case during Tuesday’s media luncheon. The Terps have had some experience with it during the last few seasons, so it’s usually pretty predictable.
Some are refreshingly candid about the experience:
“You always have that feeling that you want the nightmare to be over with,” safety Terrell Skinner said. “After the game, I was sick to my stomach because of the loss.”
Then there are the quotes about moving on:
“In football, it’s like life. You’ve got to be able to respond to adversity,” coach Ralph Friedgen offered. “There’s nothing we can do if we dwell on this game other than take what we learned from this game and go on.”
But a different story line emerged that caught me by surprise a little bit.
The Terps, even after watching the film of their 52-13 pounding in Berkeley, Calif., on Saturday night, believe they weren’t that far away from being competitive.
It started during a conversation with linebacker Alex Wujciak about the embarassment he felt and where the game ranks up against losses like at Middle Tennessee and at Virginia last season. Wujciak put this one up near the top, and not just because of the national stage and the long flight home.
“Just watching the film and seeing the mistakes we made, made it even worse,” Wujciak said. “Some games you just lose. The team is better than you. It just didn’t feel like that when we were watching the film that they were that much better than we were.”
So I took the conversation to Skinner. He said the defense isolated seven plays out of the 65 defensive snaps that swung the game. In Skinner’s mind, a few less lapses would’ve given the Terps a chance into the fourth quarter-and then, you never know.
“Looking at that you’re like, ‘If I would’ve did this more…If he wouldn’t have caught that ball…If I would’ve took this different angle to the ball, the score may have gone a little bit different,” Skinner said.
Two touchdowns in the last 3:43 of the first half broke open a fairly close game. Cal marched down and scored on the second half’s first possession to put it away. Then it was just uncomfortable. But that doesn’t mean things couldn’t have been different.
Eric Detweiler is The Diamondback’s Terrapin Football Team columnist. He can be reached at edetweilerdbk@gmail.com. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/edetweiler.
[...] The Diamondback’s Eric Detweiler says players truly believed they weren’t far from being competitive against Bears [...]
what ifs?
get you no where.
LOL. Whatever the Terps have to tell themselves to feel better.
That’s the whole point of tape…to see what you did wrong…and the fact that you did stuff wrong means you aren’t as good as the ohter team. I’m sick of our team discrediting another team
plain retarded trying to justify a 39pt blowout with “what if” excuse.
Umm, shouldn’t Don Brown realize that the weakness in his defense is its exposure to big plays? When you attack all the time, you’re going to have guys out of position and there will ALWAYS be a hole to exploit. Cal exploited those holes early and often, at the point of attack, and down field, which is why they won convincingly. Don Brown should know this better than anyone (his defense gave up a lot of points last year – 3 times more than 50 points if I recall correctly). Is he always going to be this surprised?
Well of course if you take 7 plays away, it would be different. If you took the 7 plays that resulted in touchdowns, the score would be 3-13. There, you can justify every loss with this reasoning. 70-7? just take away 10 plays and the score would be 0-7 HA! Is this how the season will go down for the terps? Bad excuse after bad excuse?
The Terps will have a good season. Cal is just THAT good. Watch as the season unfolds, and the sting of the game will fade as Cal rises up to the top 5.