Middle Tennessee Blue Raiders College Football Pregame Quote, 10/24/2022

(UTEP is) coming off a good win. They beat FAU at the buzzer, they kicked a field goal at the buzzer to win. They’re 4-4. They’ve got a really good team. They beat Boise State earlier in the year. They’ve got some really really good players. Their quarterback is doing a really nice job of running that offense, doing a good job protecting the ball. They’re a physical offense, they’re going to come after you. They’re going to try to pound the ball but take shots over the top of you also. Very impressed with what they’ve been doing offensively.

And then defensively, they are all over the place. They’re going to pressure you, they’re going to blitz you, give you a variety of different fronts. We’ve got to be able to handle their pressures and the different variations of the coverages and the fronts that we’re going to see. They’ve got really good players. I’ve been very impressed with them and how they’ve played this year.

In the kicking game, they returned a punt for a touchdown earlier in the year. They’ve got good kickers. The kicking game is going to be critical as it always is, so we’ve got to be ready to go. You get to this time of the year and your focus is as much on your opponent as it is yourself. We had two good practices last week and a good practice yesterday. I like where we’re at from a mental standpoint, the guys are going to be fired up to go out there and play.

On how important the open date last week was to reset:

We’ve got a little bit of a head start on UTEP, we practiced two days last week. But they’ve been going since August 1st. About 10 weeks, they’ve been going. That’s a long time. That’s a long time on your body, it’s a long time mentally with everything else they’ve got going on in their life. I think it was a good break for them, they came back yesterday ready to go. And it gave us coaches a chance to kind of evaluate what we’ve been good at, what we haven’t been good at, what we need to improve on after seven games and also got out and did some recruiting those couple of days, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

I don’t know from an injury standpoint if we’re going to get anybody back because of that, but at least mentally, they got a good little break in there.

On the travel times to El Paso and the late kickoff:

Not that big of an issue getting there, it’s a three hour flight. Some flights are two hours, so an added hour isn’t drastically different going out there. What’s different is just managing Saturday. We’re the third latest game played Saturday, we’ll feel like a Pac-12 team. So we’ve got to do a good job of handling our day, organizing our day on Saturday because it is a long day. You can’t just lay up in a bed all day, you’ve got to get them up and get them out. Do some things differently than what we have, and we’ll do that.

Just getting back, we’re going to get back at five in the morning, which when you start talking about student health or student welfare, you’re getting back at five in the morning and you’ve got to turn around and get ready for your next game as coaches and as players. I think handling Saturday and getting back creates more issues than going out there.