UH head coach Tony Levine found a silver lining in the Cougars’ 37-6 loss to UCLA on Saturday.
“I thought we had good effort tonight. I thought there were some things that we did poorly last week that we improved on, specifically tackling defensively against a great UCLA offense,” Levine said at the post-game press conference.
The defense was active and attacking, forcing five turnovers. However, the offense turned the ball over six times. Redshirt sophomore David Piland threw five interceptions Saturday, which comes one week after setting an NCAA record for most pass attempts without an interception against Louisiana Tech.
“When you create that many turnovers defensively, it gives you a chance to win the football game. Unfortunately we turned it over more offensively,” Levine said.
Turnovers, dropped passes and penalties have been a problem for the Cougars all season. The team has continuously committed unforced errors.
UH is averaging more than eight penalties and 72 penalty yards per game. Some have come at critical points that extended an opponent’s drive or derailed an offensive possession. The mental mistakes have been a problem in all three games.
Against LA Tech, the Cougars’ receivers dropped two touchdowns that took points off the board, and there were key drops on third downs.
Levine said the dropped passes and penalties were not mental errors after last week’s loss.
“Penalties and dropped passes aren’t mental mistakes. When a ball is coming to a receiver, he knows in his mind to catch it. It’s a number of things. Some of those guys are inexperienced. We need to work more specific catches in practice,” Levine said. “I’m not making excuses; we’ve got to make plays.”
The Cougars have started games poorly, and second-half adjustments have not been effective. UH has been outscored 42-16 in the first quarters of games and 34-10 in the third quarter.
UH was down 21-20 coming out of the break against LA Tech. The Bulldogs then scored 14 unanswered points before eventually outpacing UH 21-7 in the third quarter.
Halftime is an opportunity to regroup and improve strategy. The Cougars have not taken advantage.
UH has also had problems scoring touchdowns in the red zone. UH is 6-9 (67 percent) in red zone scoring, conversely, their opponents are 17-18 (94 percent).
Despite the issues, Levine said the team has to move forward with the last nine games of the season.
“Going into the bye week now, it really becomes a nine‐game season for us and we’ve got to get some guys off the injury report and back healthy as soon as we can.”
UH alumni and ESPN 97.5 radio host Fred Faour was not as optimistic.
“This is the worst UH team since the Dana Dimel era,” Faour said.
The good thing for the Cougars is that the team has a chance to prove doubters wrong and salvage a Conference USA title if they start winning. The first step is to stop beating themselves up.
