He was not overly concerned about bars and beam, partly because Utah came back with a reasonably good floor set, despite Daria Bijak putting her hands down on a low punch front and being docked for a fall. Jessica Duke opened with 9.8, Stephanie Neff came back from several weeks off for an Achilles injury to step into Postell's place on short notice and scored 9.8, Annie DiLuzio punched out a 9.9, and Kristina Baskett scored 9.875 while completing all of her upgraded segments well.

Most of the Utes attributed the blah meet to the week layoff they had after doing two meets on one weekend and then taking all of last week off from competition.

Marsden said he felt it during warm-ups. "It was like we had a week off." The gymnasts seemed to forget to do things they automatically do in the warm-ups and just seemed off, despite the 49.55 vault.

"We didn't seem focused and sharp," he said. As opposed to all the other meets this year, Marsden said, Utah appeared to be laboring a bit instead of easily flowing through routines. But he was OK with it this time.

The Utes said nothing about Friday's mistakes made them think about last year's collapses that seemed to happen every meet. "We kept fighting," said DiLuzio, contrasting that to 2007, when everyone seemed to give up once something went wrong.

Some even thought have a down meet now might help them get refocused in a hurry for the next two weeks, when they travel to No. 3 Florida and No. 4 Michigan. "I just want to go in, look sharp and push it to the last rotation," he said of the next two weeks.

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E-mail: lham@desnews.com

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