AMHERST — The easiest way to judge the severity of the situation at UMass? The tone of Andy Isabella’s voice.
The senior wide receiver is not one to normally make a splash. As he explained after Saturday’s 63-24 loss to Florida International, he dealt with the internal frustrations of the past by “trying to keep to myself, keep my head down and play hard.”
But after the Minutemen were dominated on both sides of the ball for a third straight week, Isabella let his raw emotions take over in the nighttime Miami humidity. The anger seethed from Isabella as he described his view of the situation inside the UMass locker room.
“I feel like there’s no hope on the team right now,” Isabella said postgame. “Something’s got to change to give us hope and give us something to look at because right now everything’s dead and blah. … There doesn’t seem to be any hope at all.”
Almost 48 hours later, the tone was a bit different around the UMass locker room, but there was some validity brought to Isabella’s claims. Among Isabella’s most pointed criticisms of the UMass locker room was a lack of maturity. He said the players lacked focus on their road trips.
“People come down here and people start taking it as like a vacation almost,” Isabella said. “People are having fun and going out, and we have a game, we need to stay in the hotel and focus on the game.”
UMass officials clarified that some players went out with family in the Fort Lauderdale area.
Senior guard Jake Largay admitted the difference in maturity between the veterans and younger players has made the past three weeks a bit harder on the field as more inexperienced players have been forced into action by injuries.
“We do have a more veteran team than we have in the past and over the spring and over the summer and during training camp, all of the seniors, all of us were taking it into our own hands to be leaders and make sure everybody was doing their job,” Largay said after practice Monday. “Over the past couple of weeks, the difference between the amount of seniors and older guys and the younger kids (has waned). There are 17 (upperclassmen) starting and then the rest of them are either sophomores and freshmen. It’s hard to work together like that because you’re on different maturity levels.
“But at the same time, the last three weeks just hasn’t been us and how we’ve practiced over the spring and over the summer.”
The Minutemen went with full pads for Monday’s practice to set the tone for the week, and it resulted in a more intense session than a normal Monday. Linebacker Bryton Barr said there is a much different, more aggressive mentality amongst players when they are dressed in full pads as opposed to when they are in shoulder pads and shorts or doing a simple walkthrough.
However, practices have not been the issue for the Minutemen this season. By all accounts from coach Mark Whipple and his seniors, UMass has had great weeks of practices the past three weeks, it just hasn’t translated into the performance on Saturdays. Barr said he believes UMass has the opposite problem most teams have, which is taking practice more seriously than it does games.
“We haven’t been treating our games like practice, so we need to have that carry over,” Barr said. “If we have that kind of intensity that we had today and we all do our jobs, we should have a different team come Saturday and hopefully the fans see that.”
What might also help is the players-only meeting Barr said will occur Tuesday in which everyone will have a chance to air out their grievances and work toward coming together as a team. Barr said the meeting might be what UMass needs with frustrations potentially boiling inside players in order to smooth over tensions and re-focus on winning games.
“At the end of the day, there’s 11 guys stepping on the field, no coaches are going out there with us,” Barr said. “We just have to stay together as a team, play as a team and have to learn from our mistakes. When the going gets tough, we have to bounce back, so we’re really just stressing staying together.”
QB CONDUNDRUM — Whipple said senior quarterbacks Ross Comis and Andrew Ford were “better today,” but neither of them practiced. They remain day-to-day with redshirt junior Michael Curtis taking the reps with the first-team offense during Monday’s practice.
Josh Walfish can be reached at jwalfish@gazettenet.com. Follow him on Twitter @JoshWalfishDHG. Get UMass coverage delivered in your Facebook news feed at www.facebook.com/GazetteUMassCoverage.