Justin Wilcox on the Cal defeat at Utah: “It starts with me.”

Head Coach Justin Wilcox

On how you approach your team in the locker room tonight –

“We have to be better. There are injuries and that’s part of the game. It starts with me. I have to give them better answers. Myself and our coaches have to help our players, and the players have to go out and execute to the best of their ability. If we do that and it’s good enough, we’ll win; if it’s not, we won’t. I think it’s going to be a week of getting healthy and pushing reset. We’ve got to own it. We signed our names to the performance, and it wasn’t good enough, obviously.”

On the offense not possessing the ball the defense getting worn down –

“We didn’t play well. We didn’t play the run well. We didn’t play the pass well. We didn’t tackle very well. We didn’t do anything. Their offense, whether it was run game or pass game, they kind of did whatever they wanted and we weren’t able to get enough stops. It’s not for a lack of effort. We didn’t have a lot of loafs on tape. We didn’t make the plays and they did. It’s really frustrating. We have to go back and keep encouraging the guys and keep coaching them and giving them answers. That’s our job. We don’t talk about the other side of the ball. It’s a team game. We don’t talk about if the offense does this or that, or doesn’t. It’s a team game.”

On Spencer Brasch’s performance –

“Just wanted him to go out there and cut it loose. Spencer can throw the ball. It was tough to get things going, which would be a little bit of an understatement. The run game, pass game, we’ve got to help him some more. We have to give him answers. I think Spencer did fine. This is not on Spencer.”

On why the defense hasn’t played well lately –

“If it was one thing we would do the drill and fix it. It’s not one thing. We have to tackle better. We have to better on the run game. We have to cover better. Tonight, we didn’t do any of that. It’s not for lack of effort. If it was one thing, we would do that drill and fix it.”

Spencer Brasch

On how he played tonight –

“I was just trying to make plays. Just trying to do what I can and move the ball. There were still some passes I could have completed, some reads I could have made and some things I could have done better.”

On what Utah did to make things tough for him –

“It’s a pretty solid scheme. They were blitzing us in certain ways and we were just trying to pick them up. They had great coverage. Their secondary is nice and their front is phenomenal. They just beat us up and down the field.”

Jake Curhan

On how big of a punch in the gut this loss is –

“It’s huge. I speak for myself and everyone else on the team in saying that we never go into a game expecting to lose and we were not expecting to lose in that fashion. That’s not what our expectations are here. We go into every game expecting to be able to grind it out and get a victory. It’s been a long time since we played a game and it felt this way.”

Kuony Deng

On what blew the game open for Utah –

“Early on we gave up explosive plays and bailed them out on third and long. We were making them earn everything they got and then on third and long we’d have some miscommunication. Those are plays that very rarely come against our defense. We usually make them earn what they get. We just had too many plays where we had miscommunication and breakdowns.”