Big plays doomed the Badgers, and Wisconsin football head coach Paul Chryst wasn’t happy about it.
No. 3 Alabama scored three of their five touchdowns from more than 37 yards away from the goal line in its 35-17 win over Wisconsin Saturday night.
Crimson Tide running back Derrick Henry broke runs of 37 and 56 yards for touchdowns, and Kenyan Drake’s 43-yard touchdown run with 8:02 remaining in the game put Alabama ahead 35-10.
Allowing big plays didn’t sit too well with Chryst.
“That’s one of the first things you look at,” Chryst said during his news conference Monday. “There’s a couple times where we didn’t leverage the football so we didn’t contain it. There was a couple times where we’ve got a guy in the gap and then he thinks it’s going back out, so he slides out of it and now you’re short a gap.”
In addition to some missed assignments, Chryst said the coaching staff counted 17 missed tackles.
Henry’s first touchdown run came on a fourth down in the first quarter. A stop there would have turned the momentum and given the Badgers good field position. The timing made the mistakes harder to swallow, Chryst said.
“When you look at the situations,” Chryst said, “that’s what makes it even a little bit more frustrating.”
Henry finished the game with 147 rushing yards, averaging 11.3 yards per carry.
But Chryst said the defense is self-aware enough to realize their mistakes.
“They own it. They are not trying to duck from it. They want to get better. They see it, and like I said, they were disappointed after the game,” Chryst said. “So I think it’s a group that wants to take advantage of this opportunity to get better this week.”
Joe Schobert had a game-high 13 tackles, including two sacks. The redshirt junior outside linebacker said the tackling was subpar because Alabama excelled in spreading the ball out and creating space for their playmakers to work with.
Schobert added it was a full-unit breakdown that led to the long runs.
“Everybody on the defense had mistakes the other night,” Schobert said. “It’s something to learn from. There’s a lot of encouraging things from everybody.”