Following an emotional Homecoming win against Kansas, making Arizona bowl eligible with six wins, coach Brent Brennan started his press conference Monday giving credit to No. 22 Cincinnati over its successful season.
Apart from that, Brennan discussed the three regular-season games that remain, the challenge of going on the road for two of them and reflecting on the protection for quarterback Noah Fifita against Cincinnati.
Arizona (6-3, 3-3 Big 12) will play Cincinnati (7-2, 5-1) for the first time. The game is on FS1 at 10 a.m., Tucson time, on Saturday.
The Bearcats
Cincinnati is third in the conference behind Texas Tech (9-1, 6-1) and BYU (8-1, 5-1).
“This is the best football team we think we’ve played this year,” said Brennan, whose team lost to BYU 33-27 in double-overtime at Arizona Stadium last month.
“The quarterback (Brendan Sorsby) is the best quarterback we’ve seen so far. This is the most team speed I think we’ve seen, so it’s an incredible challenge for us in all three phases.”
Arizona has not fared well against ranked opponents this year going 0-2 and losing 39-14 at Iowa State in addition to taking BYU to double overtime.
In contrast, the Bearcats are 1-1 against the ranked opponents, beating Iowa State 38-30 at home and losing 45-14 at Utah before going into their bye week last week.
“Not Satisfied”
“The first thing you want to do is, ‘How fast can we get bowl eligible?’” Brennan said to the media. “That wasn’t the goal when we started in the fall. The goal wasn’t to just get to a bowl game.”
Despite already improving from last year’s 4-8 record, Brennan and the Wildcats have more aspirations even with a challenging three-game stretch ahead of them with games at Cincinnati and Arizona State sandwiched around next week’s last game at Arizona Stadium against Baylor.
“Now we’re in a situation where we have three big-time games coming up, three excellent opponents, and two of the three are on the road,” Brennan said. “How quickly can we enjoy this moment? Yes it’s awesome, but we show up tomorrow and we are now diving headfirst into the game plan and the process to prepare for Cincinnati.”
Getting better in the trenches
In the process of getting the win over Kansas, Arizona’s offensive line gave up five sacks.
Arizona is 13th in the Big 12 allowing 24 sacks. Cincinnati, coincidentally, is No. 1 in the conference with only two sacks allowed through its first nine games.
“We’re going to fix those thing,” Brennan said about the offensive-line mistakes against Kansas. “One of the times we made the wrong call upfront so we didn’t get the protection all the way to where it needed to go, but that’s something we already got to work on fixing (Sunday).”
Cincinnati and Arizona are tied for 11th in the Big 12 with 17 sacks.
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