MACON, Ga. - It's always something.
This season, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga has struggled to put together all three phases of football in the same game. The offense has struggled since the start. Special teams have been mostly solid. Aside from a 41-17 loss to Furman on Oct. 7, the defense has played well.
In Saturday's 30-10 loss at Mercer, it was the latter group's turn to have a get-back type of performance.
The Mocs (1-6, 1-3 Southern Conference) held the Bears (4-3, 3-0) to their lowest rushing output of the season (84 yards) and 316 yards of total offense. A week earlier against Furman, the Mocs allowed 290 and 441 in those categories.
Even Saturday's defensive performance had some flaws, though. Of 14 penalties called on UTC (three were declined), eight were on the defense: four pass-interference calls, three offsides and a questionable defensive holding call on Rashun Freeman that led to a first down.
"Penalties were a really big part of it," UTC safety Lucas Webb said. "They had a couple of shots, but for the majority of the game we were doing what we were supposed to. The guys up front did a good job of stuffing the run, and I felt like we covered well. We could always be better technique-wise, but the penalties helped keep drives alive, and that's a big momentum changer because they kept the drive going."
With the offense's struggles well-documented, more pressure has been put on the defense to be perfect. When the defense performs well overall but makes big mistakes, they can change the course of the game because they lead to scores - and UTC's offense hasn't shown the ability to strike quickly to erase deficits.
"You look at it, and probably 80 to 90 percent of the plays are very good, but penalties - critical penalties - really hurt us," UTC coach Tom Arth said of Saturday's game. "Critical situations on third downs, getting penalized; getting beat in man-to-man coverage, not playing with great leverage. We got beat a couple of times. You take some of those plays away and it's a different game, but it's tough on them, too.
"It's hard to go out there, continue to stop people for an entire game when offensively you're not able to change the field, sustain drives and go put points on the board. All the pressure's on us defensively. We've got to find a way to play together and feed off each other. We get a big stop, we've got to go put a drive together and put points on the board. When they're back up, you've got to be able to hold them to three-and-out and have them punt out of the end zone. We don't do that."
Even with a much better defensive performance - Mercer was held to half of its per-game rushing average entering Saturday - UTC still couldn't put everything together.
Defensive coordinator Tom Kaufman preaches for each player to "do his job," and his unit did that at times.
But not enough.
"This week was more about correcting things we weren't good in," defensive tackle Derek Mahaffey said. "We dominated the run, in my opinion. This wasn't a get-back game, it was just us doing our job better. I feel like if we execute higher, if we don't make mistakes and play a full game - (but) today we just didn't execute."
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenleytfp.