UL coach Michael Desormeaux knows the pain his players, coaches and fans have felt ever since his Ragin’ Cajuns lost a heartbreaking 32-31 game at Louisiana Tech on Saturday.
He felt it as well.
“Losing sucks,” said Desormeaux, whose Cajuns will play against Troy at 4 p.m. Saturday at Our Lady of Lourdes Stadium. “Losing in the manner we lost makes it even worse. It’s always difficult, but it’s certainly a tough pill to swallow to give up a two-possession lead late in the fourth. You essentially feel like you let one slip.”
Much of the conversation was about UL’s offensive philosophy with a two-score lead in the fourth quarter.
Desormeaux’s general approach didn’t change.
“I know everyone’s got opinions and I get that and that’s fine,” he said. “That’s the world we live in. Got to better run the ball to win — period, end of story.
“That’s who we are, and if you don’t, at some point you’ll get beat. That’s what happened, and you know, I can live with that.”
Desormeaux, who calls the offensive plays, did relent on one of the six play calls during an unproductive two-drive sequence. It was the first play of the first three-and-out.
“On paper, the design, all that stuff is fine, but the way the game was playing, we didn’t have a very good answer to get to the backside linebacker,” Desormeaux said. “When you front-side ‘Mike’ all this stuff like we’re doing … getting to the back side is really tough the way their linebackers run.
“We had to get to where we were able to keep everything in the box where we had an extra hat to work back in. So the first one was not a good call, and I will own that and did in front of the team.”
Late offensive issues were not the only reason for the loss. The defense made mistakes down the stretch as well.
On Tech’s first of two straight touchdown drives during the comeback, a missed quarterback sack on fourth down was only the beginning.
“Even on the sack, like the pressure wasn’t right,” Desormeaux said. “We weren’t lined up right on the pressure. Yes, we missed a sack with one of our players, but we should have another guy in there, too. We were not lined up. One of the guys that’s in the pressure doesn’t go because he’s not in the right spot.
“We had another one where, ‘I didn’t get the call type thing,’ and that’s bull crap. Everybody else, 10 other people get the call and we give up an explosive on a slant that goes for 25 yards at a key part of the game. Those are things that you can’t, like, it can’t happen at that moment.
“You know, it’s stuff that we rep and we work on and it’s, you got to go execute in critical moments. It just happened at the worst times.”
The defense was playing for the first time without Collin Jacob at safety or Conor McPherson at linebacker.
“We’ve got things going on where sometimes you get outmanned, sometimes you get beat, sometimes that happens. That’s football, right?” he said. “There’s a lot of one-on-ones and things that happen, but not being where we’re supposed to be in critical moments is, you know, it’s inexcusable.”
Desormeaux also gave Louisiana Tech credit for the comeback, especially quarterback Blake Baker and the Bulldogs defense.
“I told you it was going to be difficult to be efficient with what they do (on defense),” Desormeaux said. “I think their linebackers played really well. They’re really active. We had moments where we were able to create some explosives and did a really good job. Being efficient was going to be the challenge.”
The Cajuns had four pass completions of 32 or more yards and collected 22 first downs and 399 total yards.
“We had two other games this year where we felt like we had an opportunity to put it away and did not,” Desormeaux said. “We talked about it kind of, ‘Listen, this will come back to bite you at some point if we don’t get this corrected,’ and here we are. it’s a tough lesson to learn.”
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