Fisch, Wildcats miss massive opportunity at USC

When I’m the Arizona Wildcats football head coach, I’m going to have a rule:

If my team is a big underdog, on the road, and has played its tails off to be in position to have one play for all the glory … I’m taking it.

Which brings us to Jedd Fisch and Arizona-USC on Saturday night in Los Angeles.

There is a lot to unpack here.

• The Wildcats taking a 17-0 lead early against the undefeated, ninth-ranked team in the country.
• The Wildcats holding Mr. Heisman, Caleb Williams, to 205 passing yards.
• Noah Fifita, cool and calm in his second career start, throwing for 302 yards and five touchdowns.
• Wide receiver Jacob Cowing, exiting the game in early in the second quarter with an apparently serious ankle injury but coming back after halftime to finish with a school-record four TD receptions.
• The Wildcats actually beating USC for most of the night on both sides of the line.
• Wildcats’ running back Jonah Coleman trucking his way to 143 rushing yards on 22 carries.
• A crazy gift on the final play of regulation when a super high snap led to a botched 25-yard field goal attempt that would have won the game for the Trojans.

Which catches us up to overtime.

Williams started by doing a Heisman-like thing, scrambling for 18 yards and a touchdown on the first possession. Your turn, Noah. He stepped up and, on the first snap, delivered a 25-yard strike to Cowing. And there it was. The opportunity. One play to win it all. GO FOR TWO.

Fisch went for one.

Tie game.

Arizona lost 43-41 in three overtimes.

Opportunity missed.

Fisch decided to continue to dance with the 2022 Heisman winner instead of putting the game in the hands of his quarterback and two guys who have a knack for evading coverage in the end zone – Cowing and 6-foot-5 Tetairoa McMillan.

That’s the part I don’t get: Fisch decided to continue to dance with the 2022 Heisman winner.

For a program that wants to bill itself as young, feisty, up-and-coming, it was a disappointingly conventional decision to kick the extra point. The two-point conversion play was (figuratively) teed up to deliver Fisch’s third-year program its “We’ve arrived!” moment and put a whopper of a topper on a wild day of college football.

You know who else should have gone for two at the end of a first overtime this season? Colorado State. CSU’s heated rivalry game against Colorado in Week 3, with the college football world watching thanks to the Coach Prime hype train, could have come down to the underdog Rams, on the road, going for two for a delicious upset at the end of the first overtime.

Coach Jay Norvell went for one. His team lost in the second overtime.

FISCH, meet Brian Kelly

You know who should have gone for two last season? LSU coach Brian Kelly against Alabama – and he did! It worked! LSU upset Alabama 32-31. Various headlines called the decision “gutsy,” “audacious” and “daring.”

That’s great. You want to be known as gutsy, audacious and daring. But it was also just the right call at the right time, no matter how it turned out, as Kelly explained after the game.

“Before the game started, if you asked me, ‘Hey, we’re going to give you one play, and if you’re successful on that one play, you beat Alabama,’ I would’ve taken that 100 times out of 100,” he said. “So at that moment, it kind of hit me that way.”

Yes: 100 times out of 100. Take it. Go for it.

It’s not a gamble. It’s not crazy. It’s not even really bold. College football teams are converting 45.9 percent of two-point attempts this season. In the past few years, that number consistently has been around 43 to 45 percent. I’ll take those odds.

Fisch seemed confused about the overtime rules, which mandate that both teams have to go for two starting with the second overtime. He initially sent in his PAT team after another Fifita TD pass to Cowing.

Fisch was asked after the game if he would have gone for two after the first overtime if he had known it was mandatory in the second. He said no; he still would have kicked the extra point.

Well, we’ll never how it would have turned out. Only how it did turn out.

Sigh.

As the Wildcats head into the second half of the schedule at 3-3, I’ll stand by other things I’ve written this season:

• I’m comfortable with Noan Fifita being the starting quarterback, not Jayden de Laura
• The season will be one long tightrope between losing by a little and winning by a little
• This is Arizona’s best offensive line in about a quarter century

But more than anything, I’ll stand by Fisch should have absolutely, 100 times out of 100, gone for two.

WATCH: PHNX Wildcats postgame podcast: Fifita and the Arizona Wildcats come up just short in triple OT.