Everything Karl Dorrell said following Colorado’s 45-17 loss to UCLA

Frustrating day, but I felt like in looking at the game I felt there was some positive things in the game, even though we weren’t a factor with getting a chance to win this one. It just got away with us. But I was encouraged by the young freshmen that we decided to use. I felt he (Owen McCown) did some positive things overall, and he did some rookie things as well, but I was encouraged by really his poise. He had a lot of good poise. I’m sure he’ll look at the tape and say that there’s a lot of stuff that he can definitely improve on. We didn’t help him at times, particularly early. We had some drop passes that probably could’ve given us some consistency early and really at least the opportunity to put some points on the board. We didn’t get a great series early. We did start the first series of the game without a turnover, so that was encouraging. Watching him play, I’m sure he’s going to say ‘I had a few more plays that I could’ve made out there. On the flip side of it, though, the game just got out of hand a little bit towards the middle of it. There was some consecutive series, particularly when offense wasn’t getting any points and we’re putting the ball back to them, they scored consecutive touchdowns that can get the game out of balance pretty quickly. That was kind of the case a little bit for us, even though we made it run and it was 21-10 at halftime. We just didn’t do those things that we needed to do in the second half. Right now we have a lot of things to really shore up. There’s a lot of areas that need a lot of work that we’ve been working on and we’re going to continue to work on overall as a young team that needs to continue to grow and mature as we go. And hopefully, as we go, we want to have success, but that’s been short of it right now. We have plenty to work on and a few things that we can utilize in this game as some positive things to move forward with. We just have a tremendous amount of work to do with this team.

We’ll talk about that. I’ll talk with the offensive staff. It’s hard to really say that right now after the game, but I was encouraged. I’ll definitely tell you that. I was really encouraged with how he worked out there. I don’t think it got too big to him, but there was a few plays there you’ll see his jitters. But I thought overall he played okay. I don’t know if it was good enough to win. Obviously, we didn’t win, but there was some positive moments there I saw in his play.

We’re really working hard on trying to get those things shored up and some of it has just been some of our players are just in a wrong gap and not getting their proper gap in that particular call. That’s the challenging part, particularly if they’re busting through their own touch and somebody’s in the wrong gap. We’re using a lot of our linebackers, we need to find the best consistency that we can there to get us to play a little bit better. Sometimes it was a linebacker issue or it was a D-line issue with our defensive line being cut out of a gap. That’s a big issue right now and we need to shore up more than anything in my opinion. I know they hit some passes against us, but the rushing game in the last three, the last four games has been our nemesis on defense, so we have to find a way to get that shored up.

(Jayle) had a little bit of a dinged shoulder from the Minnesota game, I didn’t feel comfortable playing him, so that’s why he didn’t play. The other thing is we got Anthony Hankerson back, we got Charlie and we got Deion. Those are the primary three and we’re going to rotate those guys. We don’t necessarily treat any of them as a starter. We’re going to go with the hot hand. We thought Charlie gave us the most efficiency today

We did some positive things in the first half. I was encouraged, no turnover in the first series was a big point. I’m not joking. That’s something that was seriously talked about in making sure we don’t turn the ball over the first series. He (McCown) did some really positive things and he did some some rookie things, too. He’s going to get tested every week. Particularly if he ends up being our starter moving forward, they’re going to challenge him every week just because he’s so young, and he just got here this summer. The other two (JT Shrout and Brendon Lewis), the reason why he wasn’t in the equation was he just got here this summer and we felt very comfortable with B-Lew and JT as being really the top two guys to really work to be getting the bulk of the work to run the offense. It’s hard for offensive linemen and defensive linemen to play in their first years, it’s pretty hard for a quarterback to do that as well. With his progression, he came in June through training camp, he caught up to everybody. That kind of gave us a little bit of a thought process of maybe he should be our three going into the season. That’s kind of how it led to him being at that point and now where we are right now.

I thought Anthony Hankerson had a couple of nice runs in there today. I was really encouraged by that. He’s a guy that had a good training camp until he had a little soft tissue injury that set him back for four weeks and this was a week to come back. I was encouraged by Jordan Tyson. He just has a knack of making plays at opportune times. He finds a way to get open, he makes a good scramble play where Owen hits him in in the red zone and then he scores a touchdown on a different drive later in the game. Chase Sowell is one of those players that I really think is a really good player, a young player that’s playing. Van Wells, who’s our starting left guard right now, a true freshman, and we’ve talked about that with him being a true freshman playing in the offensive line. That’s usually very, very unique for that to happen. We have a few guys like that, and obviously the young secondary. We just got to get better. The encouraging thing in the locker room is that they’re believing, they’re challenged about getting better, they’re challenged among each other about getting this thing right. In their minds, they know it’s back to the grind about getting this fixed. It’s not a we’re quitting, it’s not a feeling sorry for ourselves, which a lot of things can happen when you’re at this position in the season. These guys have shown some resilience about moving forward and getting this thing going because they think they have that type of capability. We’re going to keep pushing the envelope as coaches, we got to put them in better positions, we got to coach better and I’m at the start of that and all of the coaches. Our guys want to work, they are working, they are getting better. We just have to get better a lot faster

The first things first is we got to shore up our run game gap integrity over our rush. That’s been plaguing us for four games. And then we have to find the right people that’s in our program, and we’re rotating a number of players. We’re just trying to find the right combinations to help us on that side. Believe me, they’re frustrated too. They want to get this thing fixed.

It’s been a big concern since day one. The TCU game, we had a bunch of big runs given up where we didn’t even get in front of them. It’s still plaguing us right now. We felt like we had those things shored up, we did a couple of different defensive schemes for this game, and they worked well for the most part. But still, we had some of those rushes that seemed like they were untouched. That’s not good and we have to get those things fixed.

It’s a young team that’s going to continue to get better. They’ll get better, we’ll get better. You got go at the pace of where your experience is. I want our fan base to understand we’re putting a lot of work and effort into trying to get these things adjusted to be more productive to be more of an improvement for everybody. I have one example. It’s kind of similar, but, I did leave Colorado in 1994 to go to Arizona State to coach there, and that’s when Rick Neuheisel came here with Bill McCartney. That team that I was coaching down at Arizona State was a sophomore-freshman team. We had a young quarterback with Jake Plummer. We took our lumps that year and obviously I came back here because that’s when Rick got the head job and I think a year or two later, they were in the Rose Bowl and they won the championship. Some of it is just the youth. I hate to use that as an excuse, but they have to learn. It’s like what Owen’s going through. He’s playing, he’s going to see some things he’ll go grow and learn from as he continues to play and gains experience. That’s really at every position. They’re learning, oh, if I get beat on a double loop from a corner, or if I’m trying to work a combination block between the tackle guard and the three technique loops inside the guard and so the guard doesn’t necessarily have the combination now where we’re going to tackle. There are certain things that the adjustments of football in play, in games that you can’t replicate in practice, those are the things that you have to anticipate and be able to function well and perform well in games. That’s why young players are challenged more than guys that are with experience, because they’ve seen a lot of those things in the past before. We just want to encourage everybody to hang in there. Just hang in there and we’re going to keep battling. We’re going to keep fighting. We’re going to play for 60 minutes. We’re going to play until the very last play and this team has enough character about that. But within all that, we want to play good football for our fans to enjoy what we’re doing. We understand the frustration, believe me, and that’s why we’ve been working pretty hard.

It’s hard to do that nowadays with transfer portal, changing rosters, all that stuff. I’ll say it was much more balanced and there’s a lot more vision. You can kind of see how you’re going to be two years from now, or a year ago. I think every year now in college football is going to be a change.

We’re going to stay the course. We’re working as hard as we can work, we’re trying to get things right and we’re doing everything that we’re capable of doing right now. We’re very confident that this thing is going to turn at some point. All the other things I’m not in control over.

Part of life is there’s going to be people that are for you and people that are going to be against you. That’s in everything. There’s people usually against me if we’re winning, too. So it happens a lot. That’s kind of what life is. You’re going to have to deal with some very difficult circumstances and going through adversity is part of growing up through that process. Our players understand that and are beginning to understand that. They don’t like it, we all don’t like it, but they understand that sometimes that’s what the issue is and you have to find a way to get yourself out of it. We got fighters on our staff, we got guys in our program, coaches players that are going to fight their way out of this, including myself. Those are the only things that we can control right now. We can’t worry about all the other things that could or would happen, we just have to worry about the things that we can control from our own efforts.