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At 2:30 Monday afternoon, Arizona's football team went to the movies. Attendance: mandatory. Title: No- show in Provo.

Three hours earlier, Mike Stoops, who had screened the video until his eyes hurt, gave this review:

"… SHOCKED …"

"… DISAPPOINTED …"

"… EMBARRASSED …"

"…VERY HUMBLING …"

Arizona's football coach said he has resisted reading or listening to what others are saying about Saturday's submissive performance at BYU.

"You don't want to lose your sanity," he said, smiling weakly.

UA football fans, traditionally a forgiving crew, could understand a loss at BYU had the Wildcats played daringly and with imagination. Instead, they were mechanical and tentative.

The last time Arizona played so poorly in an opener, 1999 at Penn State, it began an inexorable countdown to the firing of coach Dick Tomey and his staff.

This time the collateral damage probably will be felt much sooner. Attendance at Saturday's home opener against NAU is likely to plummet by 5,000 or more, translating to about $100,000 in unrealized athletic department revenue.

Whatever buzz created across the last eight months — NEW OFFENSE! BOMBS AWAY! — has been lost.

UA assistant athletic director James Francis said public season ticket sales, which include roughly 5,000 new accounts, are close to last year's 26,574 total. There are two ways of translating those numbers.

One. Terrific. It is likely to be the third-highest preseason total in school history.

Two, if there are 5,000 new accounts, it means 5,000 public season ticket holders did not renew, even though the Wildcats were coming off their most positive season in a decade.

Surely, many potential UA ticket-buyers were waiting to see how things played out in Provo. No surprise there. Waiting is the most predictable game played by UA football fans.

Tucson is still not a market that buys football tickets on faith. The Pac-10 home schedule is relatively dreadful: no USC, no Cal, no ASU. Moreover, a customarily attractive nonconference home game against Wisconsin, LSU, Purdue or BYU has been replaced by one with, sigh, New Mexico.

Saturday's game at BYU had three powerful variables at stake: momentum, perception and revenue.

Losing the way it did, flat and with little emotion, Arizona's season opener had the effect of grounding into a triple play with the bases loaded.

Momentum: gone.

Perception: kaput.

Revenue: shrinking.

Stoops and his coaching staff seemed to take a calculated risk by avoiding contact as much as possible in training camp. They knew the risks but preferred to stay healthy rather than open at BYU without three or four starters. Ironically, BYU paid a heavy toll in training camp, losing three starters in contact drills.

Sometimes it works; sometimes it backfires.

"We just didn't have as much (preseason) contact as we usually had," said UA linebacker Spencer Larsen. "I'm not sure if that's why we missed so many tackles or not. When we got tired, we started lunging at people. That would give them 5 extra yards."

At his Monday press briefing, Stoops was analytical and candid. He has a thorough understanding of what went wrong and why — he does not alibi — which has always been among his strengths.

Here is the abridged version:

Quarterback Willie Tuitama was gun-shy.

Tailback Chris Jennings did not make anything happen.

BYU's blitz/stunt game puzzled Arizona's offensive line.

Arizona's defensive linemen, especially the interior players, were stalemated.

Nobody could regularly stop BYU freshman tailback Harvey Unga in his dual role as a rusher and receiver.

UA receiver Mike Thomas should get the ball more.

Freshman tailback Nicolas Grigsby is apt to get a full audition this week.

BYU's offensive tempo — some no-huddle offensive schemes worked early — had the Wildcats backpedaling from the start.

It could be worse. Stoops could have said, "We're puzzled by the whole thing." Or, "It was a fluke." Or, perhaps, "We're going to burn the game films."

Arizona has identified the problem: Arizona.

Offensive coordinator Sonny Dykes deserves and will get a mulligan. He is so low-key that you will not be able to get a read of his emotions through the binoculars or via a sideline TV camera. His in-your-face work will be done quietly, at mid-week, teaching Tuitama how to learn from the mistakes at BYU and how to better identify and get the ball to open receivers.

Much opportunity awaits.

"After the game, (linebacker) Ronnie Palmer told us that one BYU game is not our season," said Larsen. "We've got a lot of winnable games left, and I really think we're good enough to win most of them."