Well, that sucked!!!

Should I catch this? Nah.

So, that was it? All the hype, all the excitement, and it ends with another loss to Rich Rod and his West Virginia 2.0 style? Does he have something on Randy Edsall? Maybe a grainy video of Randy and Jonathan the Husky in the locker room after everyone has gone home?
All I know is that it always seems as if Uconn teams are taken off guard by Rich Rod running quarterbacks. "Wait, he isn't passing the ball? What the hell do we do know?" That might be the conversation on the sidelines for all we know because, yet again, a Michael Vick clone just pounded the ball down Uconn's throat for what seems like the 3,000th time under Randy Edsall's tutelage.
There are a couple of things I take away from yesterday:
*Randy Edsall deserves a lot of the credit he gets. If anyone was at Uconn in the mid to late 1990's, they know that Uconn Football got less of an audience than a beer pong tournament at one of the frat houses. It was a non-factor.
Edsall has changed that, turning the program into one that can get games against Michigan and Notre Dame, and one that has "expectation." Maybe it's unfair to hold Edsall to a standard that wouldn't even exist if he hadn't done such an outstanding job to this point, but the reality of the situation is that, now, the Huskies are expected to be more than just also-rans, meaning that, when they produce a prodigious crap-bomb like yesterday, some of the fault lands on Randy.
We can talk about the limitations of recruiting in the Big East and up at Uconn all we want. Certainly, Rich Rod is getting the better recruits to come play for Michigan. However, it remain's somewhat disturbing that a.) Uconn continues to start off games slowly, allowing their opponent to jump out to leads they spend three quarters just trying to erase, and b.) that they still have no real way of stopping a running quarterback.
By the third quarter of yesterday's game, Uconn had regained its footing. At 24-10, they were going in for a score that would have made it 24-17 and put the Big House on mute for a while. After giving up 21 points in a little over a quarter of play, the Husky defense only allowed nine more points the rest of the way. The significance? Had the Huskies come out and played better in those first 20-25 minutes, they would have been right there to win it, regardless of fumbles and dropped passes. Again, Edsall gets a tremendous amount of credit, but the team's shaky early play in games is a definite kink in his armor.
*It might be time to cope with the fact that this is who Zach Frazer is: an okay college quarterback who is never going to rival Kurt Warner in accuracy or Tom Brady in decision-making abilities. He wasn't helped by his wide receivers, who dropped passes as if the ball were made of procupine skin, but he also missed some wide-open shots (including one that would have gone for a touchdown) and everything is thrown at 600 MPH, whether the receiver is 30 yards, or 30 feet down field. Someone needs to get to Zach and let him know that you don't get points for almost taking your teammate's head off with a short pass.
*The biggest problem the Huskies have is the small size of their front line on defense, which was obvious yesterday. They got man-handled. They got assaulted like a Ben Rothliesberger blind date.
Sometimes, smaller defenses can present real problems for their opponents. Indianapolis in the NFL has routinely had a small front line, but the quickness of Dwight Freeney and the like has made their defense stout. Of course, in the NFL, you are taking the pick of the litter. In college, a lot of times, you're taking what you have.
If Edsall and his defensive coaches don't come up with a real plan to negate their obvious size disadvantage, then the scenario we watched play out in the Big House is going to repeat against other top-quality opponents as the season goes on.
*I have no idea if Michigan is as good as they looked, Uconn as bad, or the Huskies had an off day, but even their vaunted linebacker core just looked a step slow. First, there was no containment of the quarterback. With the D-line getting overwhelmed as they were, it was up to that linebacking unit to limit the damage and keep 5-yard gains from turning into 30-yard romps. They didn't. Again, the group has enough talent to give them a mulligan for game one, but they need to play a lot better if Uconn is gonna have any kind of a chance this year.
Look, it's one game. We all get that.
One of the biggest problems I have with college football is how everyone wets themselves over the concept of a weekly "one-game playoff." Whereas college basketball's regular season is simply about NCAA Tournament placement, CFB enthusiasts claim, college football has something on the line week by week. A lot of people love that. I, personally, think it's stupid.
The idea that you're season is done, or that your chances of doing anything of significance is over after week one is absurd to me. You don't get a bad game in college football? You don't get to lay a stinker like Uconn did on Saturday and have it be something off of which to build, rather than settling in to a three-month consolation schedule? To me, of all the problems in CFB (competitive imbalance, BCS standings, the fact that teams like Florida or Alabama can schedule teams that they can beat by 60 points at the end of the year) the thing that really bothers me is this notion of "one and done."
But, no matter my problems with the sport, the truth is, because of yesterday, Uconn will go back to being a non-factor. Maybe they rattle off a bunch of wins. Maybe they run the table in the Big East. Maybe yesterday was just a bad game at the wrong time, and maybe Uconn's dream of actually making it to a BCS Bowl didn't die in Ann Arbor yesterday. But, after getting knocked around by another Rich Rod squad, it's going to take some convincing.