For the first four weeks of the season, Joe Harasymiak watched UMass win games the way he wants his program to win them.
On Saturday, he watched Eastern Michigan turn the formula around on the Minutemen.
“They did to us what we’ve been doing to people,” the UMass head coach said following the 38-14 loss to the Eagles.
“It’s exactly what happened.”
For much of the first half, UMass managed to stay within striking distance despite what Harasymiak described as a lack of execution. The Minutemen trailed just 14-7 at halftime before Eastern Michigan took control over the final 30 minutes.
But some of the signs were there before the break.
With UMass trailing 7-0, running back Elijah Faulkner lost a fumble inside the Eastern Michigan 10-yard line, costing the Minutemen an opportunity to tie the game.
“We talked about how the margin for error is really small,” Harasymiak said.
The difference became more pronounced at the line of scrimmage.
Eastern Michigan used unbalanced formations in the run game to force UMass to communicate and adjust. Harasymiak saw open gaps his defense didn’t fit quickly enough and a tackling performance he described as “atrocious.”
UMass had just 53 rushing yards at halftime and finished with 106, although much of that final number came after the game had effectively been decided.
Eastern Michigan finished just shy of 200.
“They came on the road and they beat our ass in the second half,” Harasymiak said. “I think we started to do some things in the first half and then clearly in the second half, whether we were trying to press and make plays, before watching the film and what that was, pad level probably a big thing there, get a little worn out.
“But again, we’ve been doing that to other people and tonight it happened to us.”
One third-quarter sequence illustrated the problem on the other side of the ball.
After Eastern Michigan stretched its lead to 28-7, UMass faced 2nd-and-4. Given the deficit, Harasymiak told offensive coordinator Max Warner the Minutemen essentially had three downs to gain four yards.
They couldn’t get there.
“We tried to run it twice and couldn’t get a yard,” Harasymiak said. “Then we were forced to throw it obviously. So, not good by us.”
It wasn’t limited to the running game.
UMass lost the turnover battle 2-0 and lost the explosive-play battle as well. Defensively, the Minutemen couldn’t generate a sack or consistently disrupt Eastern Michigan quarterback Noah Kim.
Harasymiak was particularly critical of his secondary.
“I think we lost every single matchup that we could possibly lose,” he said. “We didn’t get hands on. We didn’t get connected in coverage.”
The lack of pressure didn’t make things any easier on the secondary.
“We didn’t sniff the quarterback all game,” said Harasymiak, who noted Kim’s ability to quickly get the ball out of his hands in the week leading up to the game.
“We didn’t even come close to the quarterback. So credit their o-line.”
The result was easily UMass’ poorest performance of the season, particularly during the second half.
“I don’t think there was anything that we were feeling satisfied or complacent,” he said. “I think we got beat, especially in the last 30 minutes.”
Harasymiak hopes those 30 minutes don’t overshadow everything the Minutemen did while opening the season 4-0 in the eyes of the fans.
“I hope they see that over the first four games, or really first four and a half games, 14-7, that we have a really good team and we just need to bounce back,” he said. “We had a bad 30 minutes.”
The Minutemen won’t have long to determine whether those 30 minutes were an aberration.
They’ll return to McGuirk Alumni Stadium for Homecoming next weekend with another opportunity to get back to playing the kind of football that, for the first four weeks, they had been imposing on everybody else.
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