STORRS – After Saturday’s close loss at Duke, in which the UConn football team erased a 17-point deficit but blew a fourth-quarter lead of its own, head coach Jim Mora felt an “enormous conflict” when he addressed the team after the game.
The term “moral victory” makes the football lifer cringe. Perhaps “productive loss” would be a better way of putting it, especially given that the program is in Year Three of a rebuild with its most talented roster under Mora’s tenure. But that classification won’t fit until the progress is seen when the team takes the field next.
“You can’t be satisfied with (the comeback). I think you have to acknowledge it, but you don’t necessarily – it’s not an achievement unless you win the game,” he said Tuesday. “Our guys have a great understanding of that and that’s why when you’re talking to your team after a game like that there’s this enormous conflict inside of you as a coach and I felt this enormous conflict inside of our players as well. Because we all recognized that we’ve made progress but we failed in our objective, which was to win the game.”
The positive takeaway in “losing small” is that many of the mistakes can be fixed with attention to detail in practice.
UConn started slow on both sides of the ball and seemed on the verge of another road disaster, but linebackers Tui Faumuina-Brown and Langston Hardy had all of the details down when they blitzed the Duke QB, Maalik Murphy, late in the second quarter.
“There’s a certain detail we’re supposed to do for that certain blitz, and (Tui) did it perfect, the right way he was supposed to do it and I just ended up shedding my block and I was right there,” said Hardy, who snatched the ball a split second after it was batted by Faumuina-Brown and ran 64 yards into the end zone. “It really just came at me and I took off running.”
Before that play, quarterback Nick Evers and UConn’s offense didn’t look much different than it had when the Huskies lost 50-7 at Maryland in the season-opener. The redshirt sophomore making his second college start looked hesitant, but his talent and potential was evident.
After halftime, Evers led the Huskies down the field twice – with his arm and his legs – for touchdowns to take the lead. He finished the game 15-for-29 with 135 passing yards, a touchdown and an interception, and ran 10 times for 60 yards.
Mora says that for Evers, who hasn’t been made available to media since coming to UConn, mistakes need to be fixed with live game reps.
“You can set up a practice for success or even challenges, but games, there’s just so many unknowns and the speed of the game and the competition and things you can’t anticipate happening,” Mora said. “…He can’t afford to take one single repetition in practice for granted. We have to make it as game-like as possible for him and he has to approach it like a game in order for him to improve. But the real improvement is gonna come in the game. Because the talent is there, you do see it.”
A ‘moral victory’? Three takeaways from UConn football’s 26-21 loss at Duke
Mora continued: “But we have to eliminate the throws that are down in the dirt or the throws that are behind a guy when they’re wide open, and that’s just gonna come through experience and building confidence and building chemistry with those receivers… So I just come back to reps, reps, reps… getting reps, getting competitive reps in a game. It stunted his progress when he got hurt at Maryland, couldn’t finish out that game and didn’t get a chance to get the work versus Merrimack, when we had some success on offense. That could’ve been a real confidence builder. Now, I don’t think his confidence is lacking at all. I just think there’s some uncertainty at times because he hasn’t had enough repetition.”
The Huskies will have to take what they learned against the Blue Devils and translate it as they begin a critically important portion of the schedule with six consecutive home games, beginning under the Rentschler Field lights against Florida Atlantic (1-2) on Saturday.
Special teams blunders
UConn has had success with its kickoff and punting units on special teams thus far, aside from a pair of what Mora called “devastating penalties” on punt return Saturday. There was a 10-yard holding call in the fourth quarter and an offsides call just before halftime, which extended Duke’s drive and gave the Huskies’ offense the ball with a minute left in the half rather than almost three.
But the special teams scenario that was the most impactful was the decision to kick a 48-yard field goal down five points on fourth-and-seven, during what ended up being the Huskies’ final offensive possession. There was 5:42 left in the fourth quarter when Chris Freeman‘s kick went wide right.
“The odds to convert on (fourth-and-seven) are pretty minimal. There was a lot of time left on the clock, we had three timeouts, field goal puts us down two and a field goal wins it. (I) felt like we could get the ball back but we didn’t. So there was no question that was the right move,” Mora said.
Freeman, the Indiana transfer, is 0-for-3 on field goal attempts this season, all from over 43 yards. He is 13-for-13 on extra point attempts.
“You watch Chris on kickoffs, he’s a tremendous kickoff guy and I believe he’s a really good field goal kicker,” Mora said. “Unfortunately we put him in some tough situations in every game to go out and get his first field goal. I’d like to hope that we can get him in a situation where he can go out there and build some confidence with maybe a kick that’s a little more direct and not quite as far, but he’s unfazed right now. He’s very confident and we’re all confident in him.”
Injury report
A club, used to protect hand injuries, may become part of the uniform for UConn’s defense.
Veteran safety Malik Dixon-Williams made his debut against Duke after missing the first two games with a broken hand, and wore a club. Linebacker Tui Faumuina-Brown, who tore a sagittal band in his left hand in the season-opener, wears one and so does linebacker Aaron Key.
The club wouldn’t be ideal for running back Victor Rosa, should he return from a broken finger this week. Mora said he would have a better idea of the potential for Rosa’s return on Wednesday, when the Bristol native meets with the hand surgeon. The surgery took place last Wednesday.
“(The club) makes it a little harder to tackle but we’re getting better,” Mora said. “We didn’t have anything significant on Saturday night. That’s a positive, when you come out of a physical game like that and don’t have any significant injuries.”
