Last Saturday’s win over Northern Arizona University did not really feel like one.
Trailing at halftime and with an offense that looked clunky most of the night, Arizona’s 22-10 victory didn’t really offer much to feel good about.
But you know what else doesn’t feel like a win?
A loss.
It was a little less than three years where Arizona fell to those neighbors from way up north. The 21-19 defeat may have truly been the program’s rock bottom, an embarrassment that pushed the school’s losing streak to 15 games. Seen as the best chance to stop the bleeding, the skid reached 20 before a merciful win finally arrived.
This year’s game, while unimpressive in the way it was won, pushed Arizona’s winning streak to nine, which ties a school record set in 1974-75 (and matched in 1997-98) and is currently the longest of any FBS program in the country.
So yeah, this is better. Much better.
If we take a step back and understand that in all of sports it’s better to win than to lose, that winning is hard and that how a team plays one game, be it good or bad, may have no impact on how it performs in the next one, we can begin to appreciate not necessarily what Arizona just did but what it has done.
In less than three years it has transformed from arguably the worst program at this level of football to one that is ranked No. 20 in the country. Arizona overcame so much, including NIL, the transfer portal and a coaching change, to have a team that is, as we head into Game 3, perceived to be one of the nation’s best.
It’s not a bad place to be, even if Arizona is expected to lose Friday’s tilt with Kansas State.
Even with a loss, but especially with a win, Arizona has shown that it is nothing like the program that allowed itself to get to a place where 20 straight losses was possible. Nine straight wins across two seasons, some against ranked opponents, is impressive and hardly a fluke.
Some were blowouts, others were close. And a few, like last Saturday’s win, came without Arizona playing particularly well. You may argue they shouldn’t have to in order to beat a team like NAU, and you’d be right. But then again, 2021 …
“I’m just so happy for, obviously the guys I came in with in 2020, and stuck around, there’s only about five or six of us left,” senior Treydan Stukes said after Saturday’s win. “And then it’s just a testament to everyone that has joined the program as the years have gone on and just trusted the process, trusted the brotherhood. Believed in one another.
“We’ve had a couple new staffs, it doesn’t matter. The guys in the locker room are high-level guys, high quality people.”
This of course does not mean the players who lost all those games a few seasons ago were not high-level guys or high quality people; character should not be questioned due to losing a football game or 20. Effort was most often there, just ability and talent were not.
That no longer being the case, Arizona has joined the ranks of teams that are supposed to win most of the games they play. It’s a different place to be than the one where you are just hoping to be competitive, a status that brings with it new responsibilities.
It’s why media members may even go so far as to insinuate that beating NAU by only 12 points is not necessarily something to celebrate.
But the point it is any win is cause for celebration no matter how it was achieved. Players like Stukes who were around for the worst of times understand that better than most, and while the hope is victories over better opponents are on the horizon, one should not let the expectations of the future diminish the accomplishments of the recent past.
It was the great Maya Angelou who said, “You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been.”
In sports, you can never really be sure of where you are going. When it comes to Arizona we know where they are, which is a long ways from where they’ve been.