Journey Wyche did not play in the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football team’s opener at West Georgia.
It did not take him long Saturday night at home to remind his coaches, teammates and UTC fans what they had been missing.
The junior running back rushed 12 times for 113 yards in his first action of the season, averaging 9.4 yards a carry and breaking off the longest run by either team, a 43-yarder in the fourth quarter. It was the most productive individual performance on the field at Finley Stadium. It was not close to enough to make up for deficiencies elsewhere in a 24-9 loss to Tennessee Tech before an announced 6,869 spectators in 92-degree heat.
“It was great to be back out there with the guys,” Wyche said after the Mocs missed out on what would have been the program’s first 2-0 start since 2022, when they won their first three games. “I’ve just been waiting my turn to get back out there, and I just love playing with my family out there.”
UTC ran for 190 yards on 35 carries against Tennessee Tech, which entered the matchup ranked 13th nationally by Football Championship Subdivision coaches and 12th in the Stats Perform Top 25. The Mocs also failed to reach the end zone for the first time since a 10-3 loss to Mercer on Sept. 14, 2024, settling for field goals of 22, 33 and 39 yards by sixth-year kicker Jude Kelley on their three trips inside the red zone.
The passing game never gave Wyche any help. Quarterback Battle Alberson’s six completions on 16 attempts yielded just 37 yards, two of his incompletions were also interceptions, and he was sacked three times. UTC’s offense was 3-for-13 on third-down conversions and finished with 227 total yards against the Golden Eagles (2-0), whose defense gave up 302 total yards (184 passing, 118 rushing) a week earlier in a 38-14 home win against Monmouth, which was ranked at the time.
“You can’t get off the press and they’ve got a bunch of folks up on the line of scrimmage, it makes it awful hard,” Mocs coach Rusty Wright said. “We have to execute at a very, very, very high level. That group over there makes it really hard. They are really good, but we have to execute better just to have a chance right now, and it’s going to be that way for a little while.”
Wyche, a 5-foot-10, 206-pounder from Louisville, Kentucky, showed he was fully healthy as he supplied four of the seven UTC runs that gained at least 10 yards, and those seven carries accounted for 135 of the team’s 190 rushing yards. His 13-yard run on third-and-10 in the first quarter kept alive the drive that produced Kelley’s first field goal. Another 13-yard pickup with 11 seconds left in the first half moved the Mocs to the Tennessee Tech 34 and set up Kelley’s 33-yarder at the horn.
The best of them came with 12:32 left and UTC trailing 17-6. Wyche took a handoff up the middle from his own 20 and ran 43 yards to the Tennessee Tech 37. The Mocs kept the drive alive for eight plays and 59 yards before Kelley’s 39-yarder cut it to 17-9 with 8:32 remaining. Tennessee Tech answered with a 10-play, 75-yard touchdown drive that ended any suspense as the Golden Eagles won their second straight series meeting since a run of four in a row for the Mocs.
Kevin Lalin, who carried 30 times for 128 yards in the season-opening 24-10 win in Carrollton, had 13 for 64 with Wyche back in the rotation.
“It helps. Gives Kevin a breather,” Wright said. “We got a good back back there. That’s the thing, is we’re not good enough to play behind the sticks right now, so we can’t do that.”
(READ MORE: Heavy workload in opener no issue for UTC’s Lalin)
Wyche’s teammates had been waiting on the return as long as he had.
“Journey’s our guy,” senior linebacker Zion Rutledge said. “We’ve always had a lot of confidence in Journey, and we know he’s a playmaker, and he went out there and he played. He had a great game. So it’s good to have him back. We’ve got a couple other guys that we want to get healthy and want to get back on the field for sure.”
Some of the players the Mocs were missing against West Georgia on Aug. 27 were still sidelined Saturday, with the receivers hit particularly hard by injuries. Wright said the offense is not going to be fixed by anyone magically showing up, though, and that getting a couple of guys back is only part of it.
“If we had all our pieces, that would be awesome, and I’m excited to see where it goes with those pieces, but we’ve got to roll with what we’ve got,” Wyche said. “I’m confident that we have something great back there.”
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Wyche played in 11 of 12 games as a UTC freshman in 2024, and he played in all of them last year, rushing for 334 yards and four touchdowns on 62 carries as the Mocs went 5-7 and missed the 24-team field for the FCS playoffs for the second season in a row.
UTC still has at least 10 games left in 2026, starting with this week’s visit to Eastern Kentucky in the last tuneup before Southern Conference play, and Wyche said the Mocs’ first Saturday night at Finley this year was a waste only if they treat it that way.
“We got it together,” he said. “We just have to learn something from this and just move forward. It’s only really a major loss if we don’t learn something from it. We’ve got a lot of football left.”
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com.