Mocs’ effort is improved, but miscues prove costly
ATLANTA — The tenor of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football team on Saturday night changed from a week earlier.
The result for UTC, which is nationally ranked in the Football Championship Subdivision, was ultimately the same in each of its first two games: a road loss to a team from the higher-tier Football Bowl Subdivision. The final scores, though, were quite different — a 69-3 loss at ranked Tennessee of the Southeastern Conference was followed by a 24-21 loss at unranked Georgia State of the Sun Belt Conference — and so was the way the Mocs played and how they felt about it.
In Saturday’s setback against the Panthers (1-1) at Center Parc Stadium, the Mocs were provided every opportunity to pull out what would have been just the second win over an FBS opponent in UTC history. Some of the improvement from the first game to the second is obviously due to the level of competition — the Volunteers, who beat North Carolina State 51-10 on Saturday night in Charlotte to improve to 2-0, have gone from preseason No. 15 in The Associated Press Top 25 poll to seventh on Sunday — but the Mocs felt like they lost an opportunity against the Panthers.
“Hats off to Georgia State, you’ve got to respect them,” UTC receiver Sam Phillips, who finished with 195 yards on eight catches and a highlight-reel touchdown, said afterward. “They won the game at the end of the day, but as a football team we’ve got to control what we can control, and there’s a lot of things that we could have controlled that we should have, we could have done better.”
The postgame mood for the Mocs, whose roster includes multiple players from the Atlanta area, was that of frustration because it was little things that ultimately did them in. They held leads of 7-3, 14-10 and 21-17, but they also committed three turnovers and nearly gave the ball away a couple other times on errant passes by Chase Artopoeus, who threw for 232 yards and two scores but had two interceptions and was sacked three times.
Phillips lost a fumble after a catch that would have picked up a first down, and the Mocs were whistled for eight penalties, six of which were before the snap (four on offense). The other two were holds, which
negated an 8-yard run by Journey Wyche and a 9-yard run by Reggie Davis.
It was a valiant effort, but one that could have yielded a better result if not for the mistakes.
“Tonight is how we should play football,” sixth-year Mocs head coach Rusty Wright, a Georgia State assistant in 2017-18 before returning to his alma mater, said of the effort. “I didn’t have any doubt that’s what was going to happen tonight. We just didn’t learn enough from last week to this week on the basic football things of getting in and out of the huddle, false starts, jumping offsides.
“… I mean, we can’t do those things against anybody, and we’ve had more penalties in two weeks than I remember in a whole freaking season, and it comes back to me. I don’t know what the issue is, and I’ve got to look a little harder and dig a little deeper and figure it out. I know nobody means to do it, but these kids battled their tails off tonight against a group that’s probably better than us and gave themselves a chance to win. My hats off to them; they’ve played their tails off for two weeks, but we’re 0-2.”
The Mocs, who are ranked 10th by FCS coaches and 11th by media, were the preseason favorites to win the SoCon but knew they were in for a challenging first two weeks from the moment their 2024 schedule was released. Neither loss to date derails their season, but that doesn’t mean there’s no disappointment.
“We had a chance to win a football game,” Wright said. “We’re not going to be in any more adverse situations athletically than we have been in the last two weeks. It’s not even going to be close, but … I don’t care who we’re playing, we have to go do things and get it done, and we haven’t done that, but you want to learn.
“I don’t think we learned about how important it was to make sure we’re lined up correctly, and guys coming over and off the sidelines, but it’s coaches and players and it starts with me. We continue to screw that up and I don’t understand it, but it’s about to drive me crazy.”
The Mocs spoke this past week about how the Tennessee result hadn’t affected them, and they played like it for much of Saturday’s game. The mistakes weren’t indicative of how well the UTC defense played against the Panthers’ bevy of running backs and receivers, or how well the UTC offense was able to move the ball against a talented group.
Yes, the end result was another loss, but with SoCon play starting this week at home against Mercer (2-0) — which has outscored its first two opponents a combined 94-12 and received votes in both FCS polls last week — the Mocs say they’re as confident as ever.
“No downplaying Georgia State or whatever, but we really beat ourselves,” said Davis, who rushed for 68 yards on 19 carries, including a touchdown. “But we’ve got a team, we’re about to make a run. We are jelling together, and there’s going to be some problems in the Southern Conference.
“We’re disappointed in today because we’re competitive. We want to win, but at the same time, we know that the opponents that we’ve got to play are going to be in for a rude awakening.”
The first opportunity to prove that is against Mercer on Saturday at Finley Stadium. Kickoff is set for 6 p.m.
“We definitely improved, and that’s our goal every week as a team: improve,” Phillips said, “but obviously there’s still some room for improvement, like always. So next week, let’s improve even more, and the next week we’ll stack days, stack weeks, and we’ll become the best team that Chattanooga can be in 2024.”