UTEP Miners College Football Pregame Quote, 08/30/2021

We were obviously pleased with the outcome of the game from Saturday [at NM State]. The guys had a good camp, and the guys who had a good camp and prepared well had some consistent runs at practices seemed to be the guys who played best for us. I think it was a good learning tool for everybody as to how important it is to prepare and get yourself ready for the first ball game. I was pleased with some individual performances of some of our guys. Our players of the week on defense were Dy’vonne Inyang and Josh Caldwell, and they both had great camps. Josh graded out the highest out of all of our corners at camp. Dy’vonne had a real focused, intense [camp] and prepared at a much better level than he ever has before. So that was significant for us.

One of the things I was pleased with personnel wise is that, we talked about James Neal our junior college all-American linebacker, he got to play at the end of the game and played seven snaps and got a sack and tackle for loss. Again, that was a really encouraging for us with his play.

I thought the defense did a nice job. We gave up some plays ‚Äì you’re going to do that, and I have a lot of respect for New Mexico State’s offense. It has a very versatile offense and really good passing schemes. They put some stuff out there that was a test to us. But I thought our defense gave up some big plays at times, but it also responded and had a terrific red zone defense. I give credit to our depth on the defensive line. We played 12 defensive linemen in that game. We basically went three-deep at every position across the board as the game unfolded.

Offensively, I thought our offensive line played really well, it did a great job at controlling the line of scrimmage. I was really please with their effort. We rolled in 15 offensive linemen throughout the game. That was good to be able to get those guys some action for them. Gavin [Hardison] played really well. I liked the effort of Ronnie Awatt, and of Q Wadley. Q had a fantastic game and he was really physical with his running ability. Deion [Hankins] had another Deion-type of game and ran really well. And of course, Jacob Cowing played extremely well.

Special teams were solid. Gavin [Baechle] played great, and made all of his field goals. I think Gavin has kicked the best since he’s been by here by far. Joshua Sloan’s two punts were good.

On Bethune-Cookman:

It’s a very difficult preparation for us because they haven’t played since the 2019 season. So, we don’t have a great understanding of what [Bethune-Cookman] will be doing schematically. We can go back to its 2019 film. But they had an interesting development, they let their offensive coordinator go, and hired a new one on July 31, I think. Basically, what we’re going to do for this game is go in a play our stuff that we do. We’ll do what we do and react to what we see and play base-sound football on both sides.

They had a really good season in 2019 with a quarterback who was a strong leader for them, but he’s no longer with the program. They have a good amount of returning starters, but we still don’t have a depth chart from them. Right now, we’ll perform what we do well, and try to clean up our mistakes.

On this year’s defense compared to last year:

I won’t do any comparisons by any means. But I think Bradley [Dale Peveto] did a really good job of mixing our looks up. He was being aggressive with his play-calling, and giving them a bunch of looks to prepare for. We defended the run game really well and stayed gap sound. Our personnel did well, and our d-line controlled the line of scrimmage.

On Jacob Cowing’s performance at NM State:

Jacob played outstanding. There were so many facets. That one-handed catch was just fantastic and then he had a big play called back and then made a great catch [72-yard reception] on the four verticals that we ran there right after the penalty. He did a nice job as the game went, blocking on the edge. Then his catch on the route that we threw to him to open up the second half and then his ability to run away from everybody was really impressive. Jacob prepares hard. Him and JG [Justin Garrett] are such a great compliment to each other.

On getting penalties early in the game, but responding in a positive way:

That is a big step for a football team. There was a lot of aggressive penalties. Like the holding that we got on the first pass that we threw to Jacob [Cowing], Bobby DeHaro had his guy blocked, stymied on the line of scrimmage. But he’s just so excited about playing in the first game that he took [his defender] and threw him to the ground, which you can’t do that. Some of the penalties that Praise [Amaewhule] got on the quarterback, he’s got to be more disciplined with what he’s doing. But he’s so good at blocking passes, that he got his hands in the air and then came down and hit the helmet of the quarterback. It’s things like that, that we have to clean up. I like the aggressiveness that our team played with, but if you’re going to have those penalties, you better have the fortitude to recover from them, and they did.