Arizona football and the art of the quick change
A surprising win over San Diego State seems to affirm the power of the transfer portal.
The transfer portal wasn’t supposed to be like the door to Clark Kent’s phone booth. It was more like an abandoned closet, the better to poke around and find the spare parts a football team needs to go from 5-7 to 7-5.
Arizona saw something different.
On Saturday the Wildcats christened San Diego State’s Snapdragon Stadium with an authoritative 38-20 win. San Diego State was 12-2 last year. Arizona was 1-11. But when you bring in 50 new players, including nine transfers from other FBS teams, you can put yesterday deep into the sock drawer. The Wildcats are new and very different, and if they can spin this win into more success, they will disappoint all of those who still believe in being true to your school.
The new quarterback, Jayden de Laura from Washington State (pictured), threw four touchdown passes. The new wide receiving threat, Jacob Cowing from UTEP, caught three of those touchdowns and five other passes. The other new wide receiving threat, freshman Tetairoa McMillan, caught the other score. The new running back, D.J. Williams from Auburn and Florida State, nailed it down with the final touchdown.
There were no caveats to this. The Wildcats held San Diego State to 232 yards and one offensive touchdown. Just last year, Arizona lost this game 38-14 at home, when they were mired in a 1-23 slump. But while those unsightly losses were accumulating, first-year Jedd Fisch was somehow presenting the Old Pueblo as college football’s next hot destination. McMillan, for instance, was a national recruit from a Servite High team that finished second to only Mater Dei in the vicious Southern Section of California football. Fisch got three other Friars to come with McMillan.
There are Arizona football billboards in strategic places on California freeways, and there are guest speakers every Wednesday to tell the Wildcats about the big, wide, wonderful world out there. Some of them, like Bill Belichick, had Fisch on their NFL coaching staffs, and Fisch makes sure everyone knows that his assistant coaches have over 150 years of NFL experience.
There is also an NIL collective and a payment plan for those who make good grades. Yet none of that can fly without results on the field. Arizona has already banked one bragging point, with Mississippi State coming to Tucson on Saturday.
The Wildcats were easily the cover boys for Pac-12 football on the first fulltime Saturday. They had little competition. USC and UCLA punched out lightweights, and transfer quarterback Michael Penix looked good for Washington, and Oregon State throttled Boise State in surprising fashion.
But in the two most vivid games, the Pac-12 was shown that college football still exists on a curve, and it inevitably bends toward the SEC.
Georgia had five defensive players drafted in the first round. It had 15 players taken overall. It took only one player in the transfer portal. The defending national champions still blew out Oregon, 49-3, in Atlanta.
It was the head coaching debut for Dan Lanning, who had been Georgia’s defensive coordinator. “He’s relentless,” said Kirby Smart, Georgia’s head coach. “He’ll do a good job at Oregon, but right now he knows we have better players.”
Auburn transfer Bo Nix was the sacrificial quarterback for Oregon, which thought it was building a replica SEC program under the recruiting energy of coach Mario Cristobal. Then Cristobal took the Miami job in the offseason, and the Ducks had to hire a coach for the fourth time since Chip Kelly left for the NFL after the 2012 season.
Losing to Georgia under such circumstances is not all that shameful. The Pac-12 had to be more crestfallen by Utah’s 29-26 loss at Florida. The Utes were the clear preseason favorite, with most of its significant offensive players returning from the team that nearly beat Ohio State in the Rose Bowl. Florida fired coach Dan Mullen after a Poseidon adventure of a 6-7 season and hired Billy Napier from Louisiana. The Gators ame into the opener unranked and picked to finish in the middle of the SEC East.
And Florida’s defense got pushed around, particularly in a fourth quarter when Utah cruised to 89 and 73-yard touchdown drives. But Utah had trouble making the defensive third-down plays to stop quarterback Anthony Richardson.
The Utes trailed by three when Cameron Rising expertly drove them down the field to within easy, game-tying field goal range. Instead, they got stars in their eyes and let the three points fall out of their pocket, as Rising threw over the middle in traffic and was intercepted in the end zone.
This loss will likely force Utah to win its 11 remaining games for College Football Playoff position, and even an 11-game win streak might not be enough for Oregon. Oregon is the only team to win a CFP game, getting to the finals twice. The Pac-12 schools are not snubbed because they aren’t seen often enough on eastern TV sets. They don’t make it because they don’t win games like the one Utah lost Saturday.
On Friday the CFP announced it will expand the matrix to 12 teams, beginning in 2026, and that the top six conference champions will be involved. I’ll have more later about this cheesy and predictable move, but if fans are really tired of Alabama and Georgia (and there really isn’t much evidence that they are), they need to take their most reliable anti-depressant and face reality.
Or they could take Arizona’s approach toward an unwelcome reality. Change it by changing yourself.
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