Arizona’s defense struggled for much of Saturday’s game against Colorado, but stepped up in the fourth quarter as it only allowed 49 yards.
On Colorado’s last offensive play of the game, Tony Fields pressured quarterback Steven Montez, who threw an incomplete pass.
“We decided to bring heat to them,” Arizona linebacker Tony Fields said. “I talked to my D-Line and I said ‘let’s go, help me out, sweat, we’ll make this play’ and everybody got there and we made the play and I don’t know what happened in the back end I was too busy rushing the quarterback.”
In addition to the last drive of the game, Arizona’s defense held Colorado to a field goal at the start of the fourth despite the Buffs getting to the Wildcats’ two-yard line.
“Once you get on that goal line it’s time to tighten up and buckle up and play boys,” Fields said. “It turns into a dog fight.
“You got to play down hill. It was very important to prevent them from scoring a touchdown. You see the difference in the score? It was because of that stand.”
After the game, Fields made sure to credit defensive coordinator Marcel Yates.
“While we were at the hotel this morning, he told us that when we get to the field walk around it and visualize,” Fields said.
“So the whole team, we walked the field and visualized ourselves making plays; and when we brought it up in the huddle, each coach individually gave us some words of knowledge & advice for the game.”
Throughout the week, much was made of Arizona’s struggles on the road and the defense only used that as motivation.
“Honestly, me personally, I want to thank the media,” Fields said. “We hear a lot from you and Twitter on how we don’t know how to play on the road, that we don’t play good on the road so we made that our point this week to play great on the road.”
With the win, Arizona moved into first place in the Pac-12 South, but there is plenty of football remaining.
“We have to clean up all our small mistakes and improve on defending trick plays, lock in on our man coverages, know what’s coming towards us.
“We need to study film a little bit more so they can’t come at us with anything we’ve never seen before so we can be the best we can be for the rest of the year as well as offense.”
