Arizona head coach Kevin Sumlin is not dodging blame as his team looks to move forward from a 44-27 loss to Washington over the weekend. The defeat moved UA's losing streak to nine games, which his the longest in program history.
Monday, the third-year Arizona coach placed the blame for what took place Saturday night in Seattle as well as what has gone wrong since the team last won a game, against Colorado on Oct. 5, 2019, on himself and his coaching staff.
"We've gotta give our players a better chance, and we gotta coach better," Sumlin said during his weekly press conference Monday afternoon. " ... We've gotta be better as coaches."
The Huskies (2-0) switched up the game plan from their season opener when they relied on the running game to carry the offense. UW had a much more balanced plan of attack against the Wildcats that resulted in 239 passing yards and 233 rushing yards by the end of the night.
Sumlin believes his staff was too slow to adjust to the game plan and it cost the players on the field.
"The expectations going into that weekend were to get better and that didn't happen," he said. "There's a number of reasons across the board. As coaches we didn't adjust quick enough. That was a completely different game plan on Saturday than they had utilized the week before by coming out and throwing it as much as they threw it. Empty sets and moving around a bunch.
"We didn't adjust quick enough there, and we didn't adjust quick enough offensively from a protection standpoint."
The loss Saturday in Seattle is just the latest in a long string of losses for the Wildcats that goes back to the midway point last season. No coach in UA history has had a team perform worse than over a nine-game stretch than Sumlin, and he understands that ultimately no matter how competitive his teams have been in some of those games the responsibility falls on him.
"There's a lot of guys that played Saturday that night that have lost two games," he said. "This is a different football team. The losing streak, for me, is different. I'm the common denominator in that. Everybody can talk about how long it is, but there's a hell of a lot of players playing Saturday night that had nothing to do with last year. I mean a lot of them.
"We can lump it all on everything, but you can just lump that on me because in the end my name's on it. So, I get that, but going to work and practicing as I say every year it's a different team. It's a different bunch of guys across the board on both sides."
Arizona's next game will be bit a bit more challenging than originally thought heading into the season as UCLA pushed Oregon over the weekend to nearly pull off an upset of the Ducks. The Bruins welcome UA to the Rose Bowl this Saturday.
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