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SALT LAKE CITY — In a span of a week, the Runnin' Utes played as close to an NBA-style schedule as can be played at the collegiate level.
It was a three-game stretch, with a semi-neutral game in Texas sandwiched between two games at the Huntsman Center in Salt Lake City. Utah won two of the three games, which could be considered a successful outcome to a difficult week.
Add to that the multitude of injuries the team experienced — five scholarship players out at one point — and the week looked even better.
But that game in Texas left a bad taste in everyone's mouth, and it was time for an honest and blunt conversation about where the team was at coming into a Saturday afternoon contest against a lower-level opponent ahead of a seven-day break. It was only Utah's third loss of the season, but it's how Utah lost that had head coach Craig Smith looking for more from his team.
"Like, it's not a very fun, enjoyable feeling," Smith said about the loss to TCU. "And I think it's not only that, it's the way that we lost. It's the way we lost and that's not us; that's not going to be our DNA. We're not going to be that team; it's not gonna happen."
Utah's coaching staff and players were not content with losing — one game or multiple. Sure, teams will beat Utah as the better team — see USC a couple weeks ago — but it's a different experience when the Utes beats themselves.
There were many ways Utah beat itself against the Horned Frogs, but it ultimately came down to the team not playing together. It was the antithesis to the DNA Smith instilled in his team early in the season as the program started out 5-0 before losing three of their next five games.
Instead of an in depth practice to work on some of the mistakes — there was still a practice where mistakes were corrected — Utah got a little more personal in a lengthy film session. Smith called it a "humbling film session" where the coaching staff had to be tough and honest with the players.
"To our guys' credit, we handled it well," Smith said Saturday following a much-improved team effort in a win over Manhattan. "But we don't want to get to the point where you've always got to have that film session to handle it well and come back.
"One thing we try to do is be real with each other and be honest — brutally honest — and that's not always easy to do. Like, it's a hard thing to do, so there's always that delicate balance of you've got to be firm but be fair, be real and be honest. And you can't hide the fact when guys aren't doing certain things or doing what you're supposed to do — then there's a problem."
And with the season already a third of the way over, Utah couldn't afford to keep making the same mistakes. It wasn't a hard sale to the team to have the conversation — a conversation the team prides itself in having with each other as a close knit group where they can speak openly with anyone at any time.
"We can see the things that we do wrong and when we watch film we want to learn, we want to get better," Riley Battin said. "I think the guys we have are excited to improve and I think that that helps us a lot."
"We kind of knew we've got to pick some stuff up," Branden Carlson said. "We've been told plenty of times we've got to be better on transition defense and not letting so many offensive boards or whatever. So I think just Friday's practice, it was very high energy. People came ready to go, and so I think it just carried over in (Saturday's) game."
Some of those mistakes are naturally starting to heal themselves as players start to recover from injury. Of the five guys that suffered an injury, three are back and in the lineup — Bostyn Holt was lost for the season and Dusan Mahorcic is expected to return in the coming days. That's good news for a team that played great team ball when all were working together on the court.
It's one of the reasons Smith said the team has been out of sorts lately, though he's the first to try to get sympathy or use it as an excuse for his program. But the fact remains injuries hamper a team's ability to succeed.
"In our guys' defense, in a way we had to start all over," Smith admitted. "I thought we did a lot of that stuff well early in the year when we were 5-0, and it's not just because we were 5-0, but I thought we had continuity and a rhythm. ... I'm just being real with it. We had a stretch there where we just played lineups that never played, relearning ourselves, going through a lot of different things with a young team and inexperience.
"The other part with all the guys being out, it's hard to get practice time — just being honest. Like it's hard to get practice time because of where we're at."
Smith also shuffled the lineups and intends to create a bit more structure for his team to get the best out of the players on the floor. Some of that was already observed Saturday when Smith took veteran guard David Jenkins Jr., who has been in a shooting slump, out of the starting lineup and utilized him for only nine minutes in a blowout win over Manhattan.
The move, Smith said, was "nothing specific," but it was a way to give the team a potential "better look" and "just a change."
"Quite frankly, I thought maybe it will help him just seeing things from a different lens, so to speak," Smith said.
The Utes get a week off of play before a road trip against Missouri Saturday, but with the team mostly healthy and time granted to make a small reset, there's optimism around the program — and it all started with an honest conversation.
