Brain, Thompson was a big loss. We needed the experienced leadership, as well as the individual play.
The panic that set in last night, which IMHO led to what Flat described; guys trying to do too much and therefore being unable to perform their own job; is the sort of thing that a leader keeps under control. My biggest Defensive concern after last night is not the lack of talent; the talent was there. It is not the lack of execution; that can be fixed. My biggest concern is the lack of experienced leadership. If we have people who can step up in that area, it is clear that they have not yet fully done so.
That said, thousands of years of history proves that sometimes all it takes is one bloodbath like this to forge the soft steel into something more useful. Audie Murphy comes to mind, but most infantry that served in the interior of Vietnam had their equivalent experience. Every active war has similar situations. The same generic sort of thing happens in sports, business, personal relationships....pretty much everything having to do with human beings. Living through one example of letting panic overcome your training is usually all that someone needs to develop into a more resilient person. And last night was the perfect storm. A bad call initiated it, where 5 guys were mugging a receiver (one clearly has his hand hooked under the back of the receiver's helmet, and is literally trying to pull his head off). No whistle to stop the play. And the replay showed enough to me to make it about 90% clear that an elbow hit the ground under the 5 man dog pile before the ball squirted loose. That turnover started their comeback. A competent PAC officiating job on that single play would have kept the nightmare from beginning. After that, it was on us as WR after WR tried for extra yardage and exposed the ball. If any of those guys had hit the ground when two people had them in their grasp, the outcome would have been different. The O could have simply kept the margin in place, since UCLA's D didn't stop us. But the combination of an increasingly panic stricken D, an O with folks who abandoned good sense in their effort to break the big play, and the occasional pass interference call that went unflagged, was enough for the finish that we saw.
My guess is that we pull out heads out, understand what happened, and give Utah a good game. I've thought all year that Utah was our toughest challenge, so I'm not predicting a win. But I expect something much different than what we saw last night.
