South Alabama Jaguars College Football Pregame Quote, 09/26/2022

We talked about this in postgame, but the Louisiana Tech game was a massive win for our team just in terms of our ability to respond after a touch loss and two straight road games. You worry about the effects of being on the road two weeks in a row, which were both really long road trips. I thought our guys did a tremendous job responding throughout the week. They played really physical.

We came out of the gates and had returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown, but had a penalty called on that play. We were able to still go right down the field and score, and then came out with a [defensive] stop and returned a punt for a touchdown. They [Louisiana Tech] answered right back and I really thought they carried some of the momentum in the second quarter. Our guys responded at the end of the second quarter and then certainly in the second half. That was really good to see. You think about [that we had] a very similar situation last year. We lost to Louisiana in a close game a year ago and I felt we let the effects of that linger into our four-overtime loss to Texas State [the following week] and we did not execute very well. We got up, but we they answered back, we never responded. It was the total opposite for us this year. I thought that was a really good response for our team.

On the flipside, we’re looking forward to opening conference play. Louisiana has been the standard barer in our league. This is an opportunity for us to go to their place and do what we know we are capable of doing, and just continue to build consistency in our program. We’ll have a great week of practice and then dune buggy over there on Friday and get ready to go on Saturday.

On the appeal process of the targeting call on Brock Higdon:

I haven’t gotten any word back on the targeting. We put in our request to the national office and they’ll take a look at it. They will hopefully give us a quick answer back on it; I imagine we will hear something later this afternoon. I feel like we have a pretty good case for it [to be overturned]. When you look at the play, you can see that Brock isn’t trying to go high at all. He’s trying to go low on the quarterback and trying to bend the corner. As he deepens the corner, their offensive lineman shoves him. I think their lineman was trying to shove him passed the quarterback, but at that point, he shoved him right into the quarterback. Anytime you get shove in the back, your natural tendency is to dip your head a little bit. We’ll see what their ruling is once they give us a response.

On what he thinks QB Carter Bradley meant by saying Saturday was a “weird game” in post-game:

Typically, in a traditional game when the defense gets a stop, the offense is right back out. We had defensive touchdowns. We had a punt return for a touchdown, so our offense wasn’t on the field for long periods of time, so that was a little bit different. We did some really good things in the run game where we rushed for 175 yards, call it 190-plus with the jet sweep, which was credited as a pass. That was great for Carter, but it really should count as a run. We had 12 explosive plays on offense, which is more than we’ve had in any game this season, but at the same time you look at the overall numbers and it was as much [production]. We’ve been averaging in the high 400’s and had 500 [yards of offense] twice, so I think there’s a few things that go into the dynamic of what you want to call a ‘weird game’, but ultimately, I thought we did the things we needed to do offensively, defensively and on special teams to have a really responsive win and a dominating performance in the second half.

On Louisiana:

When you look at their team, you see that they’ve had two really touch road losses. I thought both those teams [Rice and ULM] did a good job with their quarterback run game; they were able to extend plays with those quarterbacks. Those two teams run a little bit different of an offensive system than we do, yet they were both able to establish a run game. I think you have to be able to establish a run game against Louisiana. You can’t let them make you one-dimensional. From a situational executional standpoint, you have to do well on third down and in the red zone just like in any game. You look at their first two games compared to their last two games, teams were able to execute situationally against them. They scored in the red zone and took advantage of some of the mistakes that Louisiana made.

From the other side of the ball, when you lose a guy like Levi Lewis, there’s going to be something missing in terms of offensive production. Both their quarterbacks do good things and understand what their trying to get accomplished. They might be a little inconsistent in their execution, but I feel that’s the thing they’ll be focused on in terms of getting themselves better.

They are back home this weekend and its their homecoming game. I would imagine that they’ll have a great crowd. There are a lot of players on that team that know what it’s supposed to look like, and obviously, the last to weeks is not what it’s supposed to look like. I feel they are well aware of that, so I’d imagine that you’re going to get a pretty good response from them on Saturday.

On if there is any kind of psychological hurdle for his team playing Louisiana:

We dropped the ball last year against this team. You can say what you want. We were and still are a growing program, but we were in a tight game against a very good football team and we didn’t execute in some critical situations. We felt like we dropped an opportunity and then let it affect us in the next opportunity. We’ve talked this season about being the storm rather than weathering the storm. That’s a big piece of what we’ve talked about. I’ve shown them clips. It’s amazing that the guys who weren’t here a year ago and how well they, as well as all of us, understand what we have to do in this game in particular, the response that we want to have from a year ago, and then certainly what this means in the greater cog of the Sun Belt Conference.