Rodriguez hints of quarterback rotation for Arizona
Arizona coach Rich Rodriguez hinted strongly Monday that the Wildcats will employ some version of a two-quarterback system moving forward.
Jerrard Randall came on in relief of Anu Solomon in Saturday's 45-42 loss to Washington State and gave the offensive a needed jolt for a second consecutive game.
Rodriguez didn't tip his hand regarding this week's upcoming game at Washington but said using both quarterbacks is to Arizona's advantage.
"I think we're a better team when we have them both in there at different times," he said.
Rodriguez said the switch to Randall on Saturday was predicated more on changing the game flow that Solomon's poor play.
"He (Solomon) didn't play poorly," he said. "There were a couple of plays he'd like to have back. More than anything for us, when I made the change it was more for trying to get a spark offensively and more for what we wanted to run that fit Jerrard's skill set."
Rodriguez said Sunday's film review was a trying exercise.
"Yesterday wasn't a fun day for anybody," he said, going on to elaborate in general about his own shortcomings. "There are probably days that coaching wise, I have better days than others. Saturday wasn't one of my better days as a head coach."
He said he thought the Wildcats' effort was good, but not great. "Playing pretty hard and playing really, really hard is a different deal," he said. "But you've got to give them credit, they executed better than we did."
Rodriguez said he's not expecting much in the way of reinforcements for his injury-plagued, inexperienced defensive corps this week -- a short-coming that's been particularly acute at linebacker with the absence of Scooby Wright and Derek Turituri. He said the coaching staff has tried to be careful not to try to ask the new additions to do too much.
"You try not to put them in a positon where you won't have much success," he said.
Senior safety Will Parks said the Wildcats are anxious to get back to work and correct their mistakes: "It's like this: Every day we wake up, this is what we do. Everybody on this team loves football. Failure is like you lose something that's really important to you.
"We all took it to heart. I'm pretty sure everybody went home that night and was like we gotta do whatever we gotta do in order to make changes and be successful as a team. We still got four more games left, don't count us out."
