Arizona football coach Brent Brennan was in a jovial mood Friday night at his postgame press conference and for good reason.
Not only did Arizona take down Kansas State in a big early season contest, the Wildcats won a game by overcoming difficult stretches of play in the second half, something that Brennan’s program mostly failed to do in his first season in Tucson.
When Kansas State came out of halftime with a long touchdown run, immediately followed by another touchdown off a UA botched punt, nearly every Arizona Wildcats fan shared some variation of the same reaction: Here we go again.
Instead of following a well-trodden path of giving away a winnable game, Arizona answered by shutting down KSU’s scoring for the rest of the night and doing enough on offense to put the game away.
Brennan’s message after the game was straightforward. His team knows how to fight back when dealt with resistance, he said.
“What I loved was, I loved the response, because we had two really ugly plays back to back (to start the second half), and then we responded,” Brennan said. “We responded in all three phases there, and that’s what good teams do, is when something goes wrong, you respond.”
Brennan and the Wildcats coaching staff have a simple motto they use when communicating to players what to do when something inevitably goes wrong in a football game. It’s called the red line.
As with many mottos, the red line’s meaning is a little ambiguous. It could mean effort, attention to detail or the ability to quickly put a play behind you. Its purpose is to get the team to lock in during critical moments.
Brennan and Arizona players turned to the phrase time and again Friday night when describing what went through the team when KSU made its push in the early third quarter.
“Respond. Respond with red line,” Brennan said. “Keep the message clean. Keep the main thing the main thing.”
Added running back Ismail Madhi: “I think that’s good preparation for us to just to feel that adversity when we’re now down, the situation won’t go our way, and we’ll go out there and just respond, respond with red line.”
Arizona’s red line mantra is pushing the program back to the verge of national relevancy after a wasted 2024 season where the Wildcats were on the losing end of the type of game they won Friday night.
When Arizona played Texas Tech in its Big 12 home opener last October, a week after upsetting a top-10 Utah team on the road, the UA made a second half comeback to take a one-point lead in the fourth quarter. Arizona turned an 18-3 deficit into a 19-18 advantage, only to let the game slip away with a couple poor defensive stands.
In a similar position almost a year later, Arizona’s defense put away Kansas State in the fourth quarter.
“I feel like there’s definitely been a lot of growth this year,” said defensive back Genesis Smith. “As far as responding, it’s showing out there. All you can do is compare games, if we responded last year or not, and then see how we’re responding this year.”
Smith, when asked what was going through the defense when Arizona allowed Kansas State to tie it in the third quarter, returned to the team’s motto.
“Just getting back to red line, whenever adversity strikes,” he said. “That’s Coach Brennan’s emphasis on this team. He knew adversity was going to strike, so just get it back, effort 100-100, execution.”
Through three games, the results of the red line speak for itself.
