Player development is key for Arizona Football in 2021 and beyond

With Arizona Football now losers of 14-straight games, player development is key for the Wildcats in a season that won’t feature many wins. 

The year is quickly moving along as we’re now onto week three of the 2021 college football season, and so far it has been a rough start for Arizona Football.

Coming into the year, we knew this season was going to be a bit of a tougher one to follow. We are still in year one of the Jedd Fisch era, and the Wildcats are desperately trying to pull themselves out of years of ineptitude during the Kevin Sumlin era that was brought on by subpar recruiting and poor player development.

After the off-season we saw, few, namely myself were a little overly optimistic about the trajectory of the Wildcats. However, as we all saw this past Saturday, this team is far from being where they need to be to truly turn this thing around.

While this season will produce few victories for Arizona Football, the success of this season will be contingent on player development.

Rebuilds are never easy to go through, and when you take over a perennially weak power five program like Arizona, the process can be agonizingly slow, especially for a program that has won just nine of its last 31 games.

If coach Fisch is going to have a successful season, it is not just going to come down to wins and losses, but rather how his team develops.

As it stands, Arizona has a few veteran players that have significant roles, but as the team will assuredly win few games this year, building for the future starts now, and that means getting more young guys reps and focusing on development.

Let’s face it, Arizona is not going to have a bunch of four and five-star players beating down our door to play here, and while the Wildcat has had some solid recruiting success so far, they are going to need a lot more of it. Until then, development is going to be crucial for the success of this team in 2021 and beyond.