South Alabama Jaguars College Football Pregame Quote, 11/08/2021

On Jake Bentley’s status:

After the hit obviously, we had an examination of him then and had another one on Sunday, he is feeling the same things with a little bit of looseness in the knee. The MRI is being done today, we’ll get the feedback of exactly what we are seeing there, but I don’t anticipate for him to play this week. Jake is a fighter, he truly is one of the grittier people that I’ve ever been around. He’s a guy’s guy, he’s a quarterback who wants to do everything right. He’s seen a little bit of everything and taken it on the chin, he’s seen the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows. And he’s also dealt with injury before and he knows how to navigate that. He’s very optimistic about being able to come back in probably a shorter amount of time ‚Äì this being his senior season probably plays into that as well ‚Äì so I am optimistic about him, I just think that we’re going to have to give him a little rest here.

On Desmond Trotter:

The very first play [against Troy on Saturday] obviously you see what he brings to the table from a running capability standpoint. Dez has the ability to extend plays with his feet both in the passing game and being able to pull it down and run it. He was able to convert some third downs and get us in fourth-and-manageable situations so we could go for it on fourth downs ‚Äì which we did eight times in the game ‚Äì and that is something we need to utilize moving forward. He came in cold turkey the ninth game into the season, the biggest glaring situation was the ‘pick six’; he never should have gone there with the ball. It was a wide-open play, we had actually hit them on the same route earlier, but they had a guy who came free right there at the end and you just have to know in that situation you can’t force it because that’s when really bad things happen. He learned from it, I thought he really navigated things pretty well for the rest of the game.

On responding to adversity in the Troy game:

The first thing I told the players today in the meeting room was that we are a team right now of peaks and valleys. The peaks are ok, but you have to make sure the valleys have a limit. Right now, in every game that we’ve fallen short we have had too great a valley when you think about the beginning of the Louisiana game or the second quarter of the Troy game or the fourth quarter of the Texas State game. We’ve had a series of plays ‚Äì particularly on defense ‚Äì that we have let someone else dictate the tempo of how the game is played, I thought we played reactionary in all of those games in those moments. On the flip side, in just about every single one of those games we had a dominant performance ‚Äì particularly on defense ‚Äì the rest of those games, and that is something we have to be able to clean up. We have to play more consistent when somebody gets a little momentum going, when they get a ‘pick six’ or the outside run game going against us like they did on Saturday, we have to be able to push through those lulls and not let those things overwhelm us ‚Äì which ultimately they did as the game went on.

 On what he sees from Appalachian State:

Consistency. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Shawn Clark, a guy with an O-line background who played there and coached there as an assistant; he understands what App State football is, and I think he is very dedicated to their consistency. You look and almost everybody who contributes to their offense in a skill position is a senior. They have a graduate transfer at quarterback who is operating at a high level as well right now. They are just consistent. If you look at their program compared to ours, from a talent perspective I’m not sure there’s much of a match-up issue there. The issue is the consistency, their players who are on the field in critical moments know what to do and are executing it at a high level; that’s the benefit of being a program that’s done the same thing year after year, coach after coach because their defense and offense really schematically haven’t changed even when they’ve changed coaching staffs and coordinators. That’s what we’ve got to be able to grow to, we’re in year one of our offensive and defensive system and yet at the same time we’re going to have to go execute at a pretty high level and narrow our margin of execution against a team like that.