Louisiana Tech Bulldogs College Football Pregame Quote, 10/03/2022

We are excited to have our second home game. I am looking forward to Saturday night and getting out in front of our home crowd here in Ruston with UTEP coming into town.

On starting quarterback:

It will be Parker (McNeil) he took all the reps with the ones last week and will do so with the ones this week as well. There are situations watching film where he probably just needs to take the sack or throw the ball away. We need to give him better help on third and long and second and long with the play calling as well.

Adjustments during bye week:

The biggest adjustment is just the use of our practice time. We wanted to get better at fundamentals, look at ourselves from a practice standpoint and on the practice field try to get some reps with guys who have not gotten many reps with the ones or twos… You have a chance to really show the players how important practice habits are. You watch the game from the week before obviously but you also have more time to look things over during practice and comb over film from then. We also looked at how we prepared the players during practice as well. Finding ourselves on offense and our identity were two big things that we focused on.

On a home game changing the practice routine:

It does not change anything until Friday as we get a later start on everything. Besides that everything we do routine-wise we try to do the same. So basically it is just copy and paste the schedule from the afternoon and slide it to the morning on Friday for a road game. We are going to have the same chapel, team meetings, position meetings and walk-through’s every Friday. The comfort level of our players from being local matters too. You also have to look at both sides and sometimes there is more distractions at home because people are coming into town for the game and you have people traveling to Ruston and staying. We just try to eliminate all potential distractions for our players whether it be on the road or at home. Our guys are really excited to be playing a night game in front of our fans. Hopefully we build off the success in the last home game we played.

On wide receivers:

They have down a nice job of creating space and getting open. The consistency of where we are putting the ball and their ability to catch the ball and making plays down the field. We saw that with Tre (Harris) with Smoke (Harris) I think he just needs to relax and play football. He is putting a lot of pressure on him for wanting to make that big play and make everyone miss. If he just takes a deep breath and let his natural ability take over and play football like he has the past few years that will help him. I am excited because Julien Lewis should be back this week and Griffin Hebert just continues to make plays. We need to keep getting him the ball whether it is over the middle of the field or in the play action game. I am excited about how those guys have made plays.