One sounds like a kind of grape grown for use in the making of a white wine, the other a slang acronym for Defining The Relationship. In this case, though, they are gifted UCLA football players who killed the Utah Utes, knocking them off the Pac-12′s perch on Saturday at the Rose Bowl, sustaining that space for themselves and building their own promise en route.
Can Utah recover? More on that later.
DTR and Chardonnay … no, Charbonnet, couldn’t care less.
What they cared about was winning.
Plainly spoken here: Dorian Thompson-Robinson and Zach Charbonnet did in Utah — with some self-destructive help from the Utes, too — punishing them en route to a 42-32 win.
The Bruins are a talented bunch, that much had already been made certain by five straight wins — six now — and any study of film in the run-up to this game. What wasn’t so certain was the dominant way that talent manifested itself in conjunction with Utah’s vulnerabilities here.
In an up-and-down career at UCLA that had settled into prominence in recent times, quarterback Thompson-Robinson was Kyle Whittingham’s worst nightmare on this occasion. The Utah coach has always considered dual-threat QBs the most difficult and dangerous to defend in college football. And Thompson-Robinson demonstrated exactly that in throwing for four touchdowns and 299 yards, always capable of reminding the Utes that at any moment he could take off, so they had to keep him contained.
Um, that didn’t work out so well.
Neither did another aspect to Utah’s defeat — and an additional cardinal sin in Whittingham’s holy writ of football: giving up huge chunks of yardage by way of an inability to stop the run.
Whittingham, rather optimistically, put it like this afterward: “Run defense was pretty good for the most part, it was the big plays that killed us. We’d lose a gap and whenever we lost a gap, they exploited that.”
That exploitation was an undeniable part of not stopping the run.
(It was clear that the last thing the coach wanted to do is bury his team with at least half the season yet to play.)
That’s where UCLA back Charbonnet played his role — churning for 198 yards, half of those coming on just two carries. He averaged nine yards per run.
That combo-pack, along with an offensive line grading the road, left the proud Utah defense shaken and tattered and … paved over, having given up in excess of 500 yards.
On the other side of the ball, it wasn’t that the Utes’ attack couldn’t be effective, it’s that it couldn’t be as effective, also inflicting wounds on itself that contributed to the mess.
Foremost among those shortcomings was a single glaring flaw.
Incompetence when it came to … scoring.
Yeah, kind of a big thing.
Utah moved the ball, gaining 479 yards, 192 on the ground, 287 through the air. But it struggled in actually crossing the goal line. Three times in the first half alone, the Utes had what looked like 50 miles of open road to the UCLA end zone, stumbling on and over those opportunities.
Two notable mistakes by Cam Rising — a pick near the Bruins goal line early and a fumble that led to a UCLA touchdown late helped the Utes not one bit.
But their problems on this day were here, there, everywhere.
There’s nothing more deflating for a team than that aforementioned soft run defense. If you can’t close gaps, can’t stop an opponent’s ground game, you’re all but done, and everyone on the business end of that equation knows it. The Utes were no exception. They never gave up, they fought back from a deficit throughout, falling behind early, 7-zip, and staying behind. They closed the gap, then saw it extended, closed it again, lost it, closed it, then … it overwhelmed them.
Let’s repeat it: They didn’t quit, they didn’t straight capitulate, they just weren’t good enough to keep up, weren’t good enough to win. The former would have been worse than the latter.
Without a last-minute pick-6 by Clark Phillips, the deficit in defeat would have been considerably larger.
Where this leaves the Utes with the USC Trojans coming to Rice-Eccles next week, with most of their Pac-12 schedule still ahead, is anybody’s guess, including their own. Their hopes for a return to the Rose Bowl for the Rose Bowl game in January still have breath, both bolstered and dampened by a league slate that appears more difficult now — not just for them, but for everyone — than it did prior to the season’s start.
“This is very reminiscent of last year when we picked ourselves up off the mat and regrouped and came back focused and played some really good football,” Whittingham said. “That’s what we have to do this year.”
Good sentiments. Is it doable?
Saturday’s conclusions, then, come in the form of questions that are blowing in the wind.
I’d love to answer them here and now, but they are yet left hanging.
— Can the Utes find a way to show more firmly against the run in the weeks ahead? (That’s been their history, but we’re looking at the present, not the past.)
— Can they establish more consistency on attack — not just creating marches down the field, but finishing them with numbers that don’t end in a big, fat zero? (There have been past occasions when this was a problem, but with expectations as high as they were at season’s start, and with the absence of all-league tight end Brant Kuithe, you have to wonder.)
— If they’re physically capable of those two things, will their collective mindset be properly adjusted to fight back now, to, as Whittingham put it, focus, not the way they did against UCLA, ending in defeat, rather in boosted resolve and determination to prove what they proved last time around, that what happens early can be mere temporary disarray on the way to something much more orderly, much more definitive, much stronger eventually?
I dunno. Whittingham doesn’t know. The players don’t know. Not with any exactness.
But in a twisted sort of way, that makes what comes next, bit by bit, game by game, week by week, win by win or loss by loss, that much more fascinating.
It seems weak to put it this way, but time will tell, and, just as importantly and revelatory, so will the Utes themselves.
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