More than a month later, Luke Fickell still thinking about CFP semifinal loss

CINCINNATI – One month after Alabama shut down Cincinnati 27-6 in a College Football Playoff semifinal in the Cotton Bowl, college football has moved on. Most semifinals are forgotten by nature, especially when the winner loses the championship game. The Bearcats’ loss seems like it happened a long time ago.

College football may have moved on, but Bearcats coach Luke Fickell has not. Cincinnati went 13-0, broke through the glass ceiling that had confined the Group of 5 conferences, then got soundly beaten. You couldn’t make an omelet out of the Bearcats’ performance, but they didn’t exactly threaten to upset the Crimson Tide, either.

One month later, Fickell already has watched the defense video five times – once on the plane ride from Dallas to Cincinnati and again that night, and three more times since. By comparison, he still hasn’t watched the AAC championship game victory over Houston.

Fickell’s study has convinced him who is to blame for the Bearcats’ performance: the coach.

“Maybe emotionally, we didn’t do a good enough job — I didn’t do a good enough job — of preparing us,” Fickell said.

He didn’t see the issue from the sideline when Alabama marched down the field on two first-quarter drives. The first drive, 75 yards on 11 plays, nine of them called runs, resulted in a Tide touchdown. The second drive, 67 yards on 13 plays, ended on the first play of the second quarter with a 26-yard Tide field goal. No explosive plays, no wow moments.

It looked like one team manhandling another. That thought crossed Fickell’s mind on the sideline.

“On the field, you don’t know,” Fickell said. “(You think) ‘Oh, shit, we’re going to have to start doing something different because we’re not holding up up front.’ The reality was that wasn’t it.”

Fickell saw it when he watched the video. Actually, it’s what Fickell didn’t see that made him understand. Nobody made a play.

“We were in good position, but we didn’t execute,” Fickell said. “I think it might have been a little bit of the big stage, a bit of the jitters.”

Cincinnati didn’t look like anyone’s version of Cinderella. The Bearcats had won 22 of 23 games in two seasons, the only loss coming to Georgia in the 2021 Peach Bowl. In that one, the Bearcats took the lead at the end of the first half and kept it until the last three seconds of the game. Cincinnati returned a team full of veteran stars; six of them played in the Senior Bowl on Saturday.

Fickell made Cincinnati into a national power by transmitting what he learned in two decades as a player and an assistant. During his time working for Jim Tressel and Urban Meyer, Ohio State won two national championships and played for two more. He had been on that sideline before.

Fickell believed the Bearcats understood what awaited them. He had been there before. They hadn’t. They hadn’t even really played in a big bowl game, not where atmosphere is concerned.

“Maybe I took for granted, ‘Well, we played Georgia last year,’ ” Fickell said. “We played Georgia in front of 8,000 people, maybe.”

Bearcats fans turned out at AT&T Stadium, 1,000 miles and a million years away from home. The crowd of 76,313 was about double what fills Nippert Stadium on fall Saturdays.

The crowd was bigger. The stakes were bigger. The atmosphere reflected the moment.

“Maybe I didn’t do a good enough job at (explaining that), ‘Really, we don’t need superhuman. We’re good enough if we can execute and do the things we’re supposed to do,’ ” Fickell said. “I don’t think I prepared them enough in that way, and I kind of kick myself sometimes.”

Fickell, a devout Catholic, laughed as he acknowledged that perhaps he is taking on more guilt than he should.

He is not saying that a different start would have led to a different finish. He recognizes the difference in talent on the second line of the teams’ depth charts. He understands that Alabama scored 10 points in the fourth quarter to put the game away. He saw backup linebacker Deshawn Pace commit an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty that put the Crimson Tide in the red zone for its last touchdown.

“You’re down, you start to press trying to make things happen,” Fickell said.

So Cincinnati lost to a better team. What the Bearcats must decide now is whether they are a George Mason, a VCU, a Loyola, a program that makes one Final Four and returns to the mean, or a program that establishes permanent residency among the playoff contenders.

“How do you handle those really big games?” Fickell asked. “Because guess what: We’re going to open up the season with another SEC team (at Arkansas). It might not be in Dallas, and it might not be in the playoffs. But it’s going to be every bit as important, and the same kind of things we faced we’re going to have to face again. We’ve got to learn and study and grow from it.”

That is the task for Cincinnati – to move on.