Copyright Salt Lake City Deseret News
Any time one of his teams has sustained a devastating defeat, like the one it suffered last Saturday at now-No. 7 Texas Tech, BYU football coach Kalani Sitake has simply rolled up his sleeves and vowed to get back to work. “That’s the remedy,” the coach said Monday in his weekly press briefing as questions about what went wrong in the 29-7 loss to the Red Raiders poured in. “We will circle the wagons, get back to work, and figure this thing out,” Sitake said after his team dropped from the top of the Big 12 standings and from No. 8 to No. 12 in the AP Top 25 rankings. The new College Football Playoff rankings, the ones that really matter at this juncture of the season, will be released Tuesday night, and the Cougars (8-1, 5-1) almost certainly will fall out of the top 10 in those as well. Sitake reminded all the doomsayers that BYU is still in control of its fate. If the Cougars can beat TCU, Cincinnati and Central Florida over the course of the next three weeks, they will punch their ticket to the Big 12 championship game in Arlington, Texas, on Dec. 7. “We’re still in a good position,” Sitake said. “These guys have worked really hard. We’re in a really good spot where we can still control our destiny, and that destiny starts with this week, learning from the game over the weekend, and then get over it, knowing that we got to go to work, and see ourselves perform much better this weekend.” Instant recovery won’t be easy, as TCU (6-3, 3-3) is 5-7 overall against BYU, including a 4-5 record against the Cougars in conference games (WAC, Mountain West, Big 12). The Horned Frogs will be making their first trip back to Provo since they smoked the Cougars 38-7 in 2009 when both teams were in the Mountain West. Two years ago, TCU welcomed BYU to the Big 12 with a 44-11 blasting in Fort Worth. “We understand what’s being said (on the outside),” Sitake said of the loss that some have called embarrassing and extremely detrimental to their CFP hopes as an at-large team. “We never listened to it before, and … now is not the time to (start) to listen to it.” BYU tight end Carsen Ryan, who caught four passes for 32 yards against Tech and also helped the Cougars’ offensive line limit Tech’s ferocious pass rush to just one sack (which was really a running play for BYU quarterback Bear Bachmeier), said the Cougars will rally around one another, decline to point fingers, and continue to lean on their culture of love and learn. “No one’s worried. No one is stressing out. No one is freaking out,” Ryan said. “We will take the loss and just take it on the chin and move on, find ways to correct the mistakes we made.” As receiver Chase Roberts said immediately after the loss, the Cougars acknowledge that Texas Tech was the better team Saturday and would love another shot at them in the Big 12 title game. “We’re still an 8-1 team, one of the best teams in the country. We think that we can hang with anyone out there,” Ryan said. “Hopefully we get our chance against those guys again, and we can get our revenge. But right now, we’re just worried about ourselves and how we can get better.” Linebacker Siale Esera said circling the wagons means that the defense will continue to support the offense, even though the defense arguably made enough plays to keep the Cougars in the game Saturday, and the offense sputtered against the best defenses in the Big 12, if not the country. “We will just trust everyone around us, go back to what we know we need to do, go back to the basics, go back to doing the little things, and practice harder,” Esera said. Said offensive lineman Austin Leausa: “When we love to learn, we learn to love. And so essentially that’s how you know we’re going to become better each and every week, and ultimately, do what we need to do.” Here are more takeaways from Monday’s press briefing and release of depth chart for the TCU game: Was moment too big for undefeated Cougars? Clearly, BYU made a lot of uncharacteristic mistakes in Lubbock, including two shanked punts, a muffed punt, a missed field goal, and a couple of false starts that put the offense behind the chains. But to a man Monday the Cougars said it wasn’t due to the surroundings and national spotlight upon them for one of the rare times the past five years. “I don’t think the moment was too big for us at all,” Leausa said. “We just didn’t play at the level that we needed to play at and the level that our coaches expected us to be at.” Said Sitake: “When it is all said and done, we normally do that (cause turnovers) to people. They don’t normally do that to us. The turnover margin was a 3-0 deficit for us.” BYU’s special teams have not been special lately Last year, BYU’s special teams was as responsible for several of the wins as the offense and defense was, particularly against Utah, Kansas State and Colorado in the bowl game. But they were not good against TTU, as previously outlined. Sitake said those are all fixable things. “It’s not like rocket science or anything,” he said. “We just got to work more at it and be more efficient, and try to (put guys) in more confident positions to make those plays.” Receiver Parker Kingston, who had his second muffed punt of the season, is still listed as the co-punt returner on the depth chart, along with Tiger Bachmeier. Will Josh Hoover clean up on the Cougars again? TCU quarterback Josh Hoover made his debut two years ago against BYU, and boy, was it a debut to remember for the then-freshman from Rockwall, Texas. He threw for 439 yards and four touchdowns, with two interceptions, in the 33-point crushing of the Cougars. He’s going to be a problem for the Cougars on Saturday night, when temperatures are expected to be in the 30s with a cold front moving in Friday. “Yeah, he’s even deadlier now. He has more experience and he understands the offense better,” Sitake said. “You see him making checks. He’s just a veteran now. Back then, we were hoping that maybe him being new to the scene and his inexperience would be to our advantage, and it wasn’t. “So now he’s a much better quarterback, and you see in the way that he distributes the ball to all different receivers, the way that they run the ball, the way that he reads RPOs. He’s a really good quarterback and coached really well.”
