The most telling moment from BYU football interviews after practice on Tuesday came when Cougar defensive line John Nelson was asked how hungry his team was to get back on the field and redeem itself after the disappointing performance in last week’s loss at Oregon.

“Oh my gosh, bro,” Nelson said. “I’ve got such a bad taste in my mouth from Saturday. I know all 25 guys who play defense on a regular basis are mad at what happened. That wasn’t us. We’re so pumped to get back and play a good Wyoming team.”

When a defense surrenders six straight scoring drives (five touchdowns and a field goal) like BYU surrendered to Oregon, there are plenty of things to work on at all levels — and the Cougars know that.

“It’s about keeping our heads down and staying humble,” Nelson said. “We didn’t properly estimate how hard it was to play at Oregon. It was really hard to play there. We’ve got to take a look at ourselves and stay humble. At the end of the day, it’s the 11 guys who are on the field who are going to determine the outcome of the game.”

BYU defensive coordinator ‘Ilaisa Tuiaki said the team has to look at everything they are doing and make big improvements.

“There is a lot to fix,” Tuiaki said. “I thought Oregon was a really good team that did a really good job. We have schematical things and technical things but the biggest thing for us was that we’ve got to get back to the fundamentals. I thought there were a lot of times we were in position but didn’t make plays. We’ve got to be better there.”

One of the most glaring areas of concern was the failure to tackle. The Cougars had been very good at not having missed tackles in the first couple of weeks but failed in that department time and time again against the Ducks.

“The tackling wasn’t the best,” Nelson said. “We had missed tackles all over the place and I missed a lot myself. Tackling is Defense 101. Some days you don’t do good at the basics and that’s what happens. It’s such a big part of the game. To get better, today we were emphasizing wrapping up and getting all 11 guys to the ball. We are going to play a tough team, so we need to overemphasize that.”

Tuiaki said the BYU defense is trying to strike the right balance in practice this week to improve in that area.

“There is always a happy medium,” Tuiaki said. “There is nothing like simulating tackling. You’d like to tackle but you’d like to stay healthy. There are different things we’ve done to work on it.”

Tuiaki said he also was zeroing in on schematic decisions he had made that need to be re-evaluated.

“Some of it is really my fault,” he said. “When you are talking about schemes, it may look right on paper but what you are asking a player to do with the spacing and the timing of it, it may not be to his advantage. I may be asking a player to do something that is a little harder physically and that’s might be one of the reasons (for bad tackling). They might be put in bad positions by me and so that’s on me as a coach. We’ve got to be better.”

Nelson said that players are pushing each other to be better, to raise their performance level so they don’t run into the same issues in the future.

“We had some heart-to-heart conversations,” Nelson said. “In the defensive line room today before our meeting, some of the leaders stepped up and talked about what we needed. I’m sure the other position groups did too. You hate to lose like that but you’ve got to learn from it.”

Tuiaki noted that this is the position every college football team is in after losing a game.

“Fifty percent of the country right now is having this interview, talking about things they need to do better and get better at,” Tuiaki said. “We are in that spot right now. We don’t like to be but I think we’ve got to get better at fundamentals.”

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