UTEP Miners College Football Pregame Quote, 11/01/2021

On the Florida Atlantic game last week:

That’s week’s game is was obviously frustrating for us. It felt like we let one get away from us a little bit. The thing that stuck out to me is that we lost the turnover margin. And we’ve done that on won, but I think consistently if you want to win football games, you got to at least break even on the turnover margin. When you’re minus two, good things don’t happen for our football team. It was the first game we didn’t [force] a turnover. Defensively we have got to be better creating turnovers. I think we were as disruptive as we have been and then obviously on offense we can’t turn the ball over. The [two] interceptions were very costly. The game was very much a nip-and-tuck football game. It was a [14-10] game, back and forth, and then we give up a big turnover that gives [FAU] a two-score lead. In that game, a two-score lead really, really switched the momentum. That was two consecutive scores for them, which then led to us later in the game creating another turnover on offense and gave them an opportunity to take a bigger lead.

I was proud of the way our guys played. They hung in there and got aggressive offensively. We took advantage of some situations, moved the ball down the field and got ourselves a score. Then we had a really-well executed on-side kick by our special teams and great recovery. It was a great kick by Mark Ramos and great recovery by Rey Flores ‚Äì a couple local guys teaming up for a big play. Then we moved the ball downfield and scored. Now in the game’s got a chance. Our guys played extremely well and did a lot of good things.

On playing No. 16 UTSA on Nov. 6:

UTSA, 8-0. When I told the guys after the game [at FAU] in locker room is that the loss does not make this game less important. It makes it more important. If we want a chance to contend for a conference championship, this game becomes really important for us to do that. The challenge is there with them being an undefeated team. They played extremely well all season. They’ve been very consistent with what they’ve done and they’re playing really good football with what they’ve done. They’re playing good football on three segments of what they’re doing. They have a really talented team. They’re very experienced with a lot of players coming back from last year. For us, the challenge of trying to stop their running back that’s really super productive, physical and very good player. The quarterback is very athletic and mobile. Their receivers are dynamic and very well balanced. They have two good tight ends. Just very well-balanced on offense.

Defensively, they’ve always been very athletic since I’ve been here. They have really good athletes on the defensive side of the football. They’ve given up 79 yards a game rushing, so they’ve been really good against the rush. They’ve had a few teams who are passing teams and threw the ball on them, but that’s WKU who can throw the ball on anybody. It’s a huge challenge and it’s a great chance for us to get back on track.