Hansen: Cats bounce up off mat, rout Beavers

“Guys, this is Paul Magloire. He played last season in Yuma. Yes, Yuma. He’ll be starting at linebacker. Yes, I know, he’s a safety and he’s never made more than three tackles in a game, but he’s all we’ve got. Wish him the best.

“And this is Jace Whitaker, look it up. J-a-c-e. He’s No. 17. Freshman from SoCal, and he barely weighs 160. He’s not even on the depth chart, but he’ll be playing most of the game at cornerback because, frankly, everyone else is injured.

“And this is Layth Friekh. He started one game in his life, against UTSA. He’s gonna be our new left tackle. That’s where the big boys play. Make sure you’ve got his back.

“And one more thing: This is Anu Solomon. Remember him? He’s back. This is our last chance guys. Lose today and, pfffft, we’re done. Remember that thing I say about pulling the rope? If you’re ever going to pull, today’s the day.”

So here’s how it played out: Arizona staged a Category 5 storm and swamped Oregon State 44-7.

Magloire made a game-high nine tackles. The UA secondary, which for much of the game deployed Whitaker and fellow true freshman Demetrius Flannigan-Fowles, limited the Beavers to 98 passing yards and a 34 percent completion percentage, which you don’t even see in the Pop Warner league.

And using Friekh as part of the rearranged offensive line, the Wildcats gained 644 yards and blocked so effectively that Solomon was sacked just once.

This came as a bit of a surprise, even against the bottom-feeding Beavers. Arizona was beaten so thoroughly by UCLA and Stanford that you wondered, like Humpty Dumpty, if RichRod could put all the pieces together again.

“I tried not to show it on the outside, but I was miserable all week,” he said late Saturday afternoon. What didn’t the coach like? He loved the heat (90 degrees at kickoff) and liked what he saw after an edgy series of practices and team meetings.

“I liked the look in their eyes all week,” he said.

This was RichRod’s 46th game at Arizona and rarely has he shown such a happy face at the postgame briefing. For now, a full-blown crisis has been avoided.

The UA had been so bad the last two weeks that Oregon State appeared shaken and surprised by a first quarter fury in which Arizona blew out to a 13-0 lead and outgained the Beavers 237-51. Talk about landing the first punch.

“We were pretty confident going into the game,” said Oregon State senior linebacker Jaswha James. “We thought we matched up evenly against them.”

James’ thought process was probably shared throughout the OSU program. Beaver head coach Gary Andersen surely did enough research to know that Arizona was starting just three defensive regulars from the 2014 Pac-12 South champions (Will Parks, Jarvis McCall and Reggie Gilbert), and that, in total, 14 starters from that 10-win team had either graduated or weren’t available.

Scooby Wright for example, was almost unrecognizable. He stood on Arizona’s sideline with a newly-shaved bald head, wearing a protective boot on his injured foot.

For a man who has built his coaching career on resourcefulness, RichRod and his staff produced a gem after a short turnaround from a 55-17 debacle at Stanford. Andersen noticed.

“The team we just played had two very bad losses, and they just bounced back and did a nice job,” he said. “When you get knocked down, you decide where you are at, and whether or not you come back. ‘’

Arizona came back.

It got so bad for the Beavers that while trailing 37-7 in the third quarter, they attempted a fake punt. It worked, too. Everybody was open deep — but punter Brent VanderVeen almost threw the ball into the north end zone seats.

“I truly thought these kids would play well today,” said Andersen. “We absolutely did not.”

Unlike a fan, a college football coach does not diminish a victory because it came against a team like Oregon State. They all add up the same, one by one. RichRod had been informed that the Beavers were 6-0 in Tucson this century, and even though he lived in West Virginia for most of those damaging setbacks, he is aware of how much trouble the Beavers have been to Arizona’s football program for 15 years.

So RichRod went all out; he all but prayed for the sun to beat down on the visitors from Drizzleworld, if only for the psychological lift it would give his team.

“This is going to be perfect,” he said. He asked athletic director Greg Byrne if all UA home games could start at 1 p.m. And then he laughed.

RichRod hadn’t laughed since September.

The only difficulty Arizona encountered all day was a right arm/shoulder injury to tailback Nick Wilson in the first quarter. The UA led by a thin 7-0 when Wilson sat on a training table, surrounded by doctors and trainers. Even Scooby leaned in to offer encouragement.

When Wilson was upright, a doctor put a football in his right arm and appeared to ask him to hold it tight. The doctor tried to wrest the ball away from Wilson, who grimaced and pulled back as if a dentist had said “open wide, this might hurt.”

At almost exactly the same moment, Wilson’s replacement, Jared Baker ran 73 yards through the OSU defense.

The rout was on. It didn’t hurt a bit.