Rusty Wright said this past week that for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football team to defeat Western Carolina, the Mocs would have to be good at “the little things.”
UTC’s seventh-year head coach spoke from experience — some of it painful — and as Saturday afternoon turned to night at Finley Stadium, it turned out he couldn’t have been more right.
The Catamounts took advantage of two short fields leading to touchdowns and picked off two Camden Orth passes, including one deep in Western Carolina territory late in the fourth quarter, to defeat the Mocs 35-28 on homecoming for UTC.
It’s the Mocs’ fourth consecutive loss in the series with the Catamounts, and all four have been decided near the end as one-possession games.
“We had an opportunity to go down there and win it and didn’t get it done,” Wright said. “We had too many missed opportunities, so that’s the thing, is we’re going to look back on it, and it’s not going to be anything that we don’t know how to do. It’s just a matter of doing it, and we’ve got to do it better. I’ve got to better with them, but we’ve got to execute in some crucial moments and get it done.