Sigh. The trade-off for getting a much needed night with friends in Pittsburgh following the game, is that the crap to do at home immediately piles back and I owe the wife some extra kid-watching. So, Sunday and Monday were essentially lost without any media recap or any detailed review of the UConn-Pitt game.

Now it is Tuesday and it really is time to get focused on the coming Friday night game at Rutgers (and yes, there will be a liveblog full of impulsive declarations and hyperbolic statements as the game takes place).

Still, I can’t just let it go that simply. The Cat Basket has some more thoughts on the game well worth reading. They also make a very good point about the defenses stubbornness with regards to too heavy a faith in the base 4-3.

Media recapping on the Pitt side is covered in good form over at Eye of a Panther.

I think most Pitt fans are still waiting to see if Pitt can play a good game for both halves. On the bright side, it only cost Pitt one game this season. The downside is that the games are getting harder and that won’t fly much longer.

I want to ignore the whole booing Stull thing after he and offense came back on the field following the pick-6, except that from my vantage point the boos were actually short-lived and not widespread. To the credit of the students and a good amount of other fans started cheering and trying to drown out the negativity as much as encourage Stull. It was moronic and had no excuse. It also did not seem that loud to me at the game, though, I don’t know how it sounded on TV.

Now from the UConn perspective things get interesting. This is the second game the Huskies have lost this season and both came with double-digit leads late. As we all know, it was frustrating to see Pitt blow a double-digit lead in Raleigh a few weeks back. So imagine how it must feel to see it happen twice. Especially when the Huskies have been outscored 40-10 in the 4th in 1-A games. As to the why? The UConnBlog tries to break it all down and comes up without a unified field theory to explain it.

All are plausible, but there isn’t one that seems to be the true issue holding them back. Maybe it’s all of them? Maybe it’s one no one’s mentioning? Maybe Pitt simply had the talent to overwhelm them when it stopped shooting itself in the foot? Who knows. Regardless, nothing explains why all these things happened all at one time three times in a month-plus.

Coaches, players and pundits will probably eventually fall back on old, nonsensical coach speak, saying the Huskies need to have more want-to and have-at-it. But there were no actual answers, nothing the team can try to work on in practice this week. Meaning these fourth-quarter questions might be lingering over them all season.

But the one answer they did find Saturday was one they’d hoped to dispell in September: A team desperately searching for some sense of direction, some of kind of identity, may have found it in the art of the choke.

Not that they are bitter. No one ever thinks of the bunnies.

Of course there follows the rational discussion after a bitter loss when fans start asking whether their coach can take them to “the next level.”

Overall, a “C” effort from UConn, and the team really can’t tell you what happened.

Finally, while there have been complaints (that have diminished) about Stull at QB this year, compared to UConn’s issues at the spot it is all good. So much so, the Husky beat writer came away impressed.