Houston Cougars College Football Pregame Quote, 09/03/2019

On settling down after the first quarter against Oklahoma

That was a pretty dynamic atmosphere. I think Oklahoma put a lot into the game. They had a lot of new people on offense, so they were out to prove something. Defensively, they were obviously pretty motivated, especially because they were playing for a new coordinator. You have to give the opponent a little bit of credit for what transpired.

Our guys went into the game pretty amped up, maybe too amped up. They wanted to play well, and when you give up a score when you’re down three drives it doesn’t make things any better. It took a quarter to settle down, but after that we played a really good second quarter. When we went into halftime our couches and players were really tuned in and we had a motivating, good halftime, but evidently so did they because of the way they played in the third quarter.

I am proud of how the guys hung in and played hard. That’s all I can ask for. We know we have a lot to work on. We need to continue to work hard, play harder and make improvements; that’s how we’re going to win games.

On how to approach this week’s opponent: 

We’ll approach this game the same way we approached last week. It sounds like “coach speak”, but it’s true. We have a routine that we try to get into, and it’s a little tougher this week because we have six days and not seven, but that’s something we have to get used to because a lot of our schedule is like that.

We have a plan for these types of weeks, but the toughest part of the plan is moving on from the previous game and introducing a new opponent. It’s a challenging transition day, but after that we’re good. We have an approach that we’re going to take because we have got to improve. The good news is that we have a lot of video that we can watch, so we can look at what we can do better and what needs to change.

It doesn’t matter who you’re playing at this point. It matters about being able to improve and fix a mistake from the first time.

On a message to the team after the loss: 

It doesn’t matter who we play. We’re playing the purple team this week, last week it was the maroon team. It gets to a point in the season where specific opponents mean a little more or a little less, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true in the beginning of the year. It’s more about you, your development, and your improvement than it does anything else. We’ll focus on the purple team this week.

On team’s health going into the game: 

It was really good. There was nothing to report. Patrick Carr will practice this week and we’ll see how he looks and hopefully get some snaps out of him on Saturday, but we didn’t lose anyone in that game. 

On scouting Prairie View: 

We watched them yesterday. We focused on us and watched our game on the plane. We got in at three, came back in the morning, watched us again, had a meeting and then we moved onto the purple team. Obviously, Prairie View is going to come in and play hard. They’ve got good players, they’ve won games, they’re going to be excited and we’ve got to get our tail ready to play them. It’s way more about us and continuing to improve. We did a lot of good things, but we did a lot of bad things that we have to fix. 

On the offensive line: 

D.J. Small has to keep getting better. Ka’Darian Smith probably has more experience than D.J. does. I was really happy with Pepe (Damarion Williams), he played really well. We’re still competing to find who our next cornerback will be, that’s an ongoing battle. Gio Pancotti established himself as a starter, but he had a groin issue for about 10 days and came back game week, but he hadn’t logged the amount of reps that we wanted him to log. The question is how they’ll progress throughout the week, who gets the starting spot, but they’ll both play. Dennis Bardwell came in and got about eight or 10 snaps as well. 

On Colin Samuel at corner position: 

We recruited him as a Grad-transfer because we needed another body there. We’re pretty thin at corner. He hasn’t practiced. That knee is still an ongoing thing. We anticipate him getting cleared at some point and maybe we apply for a 6th year if he can’t get it right. I don’t know what we’re doing with him yet; I haven’t seen him on the practice field. I think he’s a good player he stared at UCLA for a year or whatever it was I just haven’t seen him practice yet. After he gets cleared there’s going to be a period of getting him practiced to where he knows what to do. I know you want to talk about it, but I hesitate to talk about someone I haven’t seen practice yet. 

On players performance in practice and against Oklahoma: 

What I’m anxious to see is how we learn from what happened. How much improvement can we make from game one to game two. We know what’s ahead. There are some games ahead like games three, four and five that are going to be pretty challenging so I’m anxious to see how we learn. It’s not overlooking Prairie View by any means, it’s improving to beat Prairie View, and then it’s improving to beat the next opponent. This team’s got ability and I’m happy with our effort and I think we’re going to be able to do some really good things this year but it’s all about how much improvement can we make. 

On positives of performance against Oklahoma: 

The not-quit. That’s a hard situation to be in, that’s the biggest stage that there is. It’s Sunday night, the guys know that everyone was watching that thing and it was a pretty highly rated ABC game. Everything we did people were going to see, and we got down. A lot of teams would quit in that situation and our guys didn’t. They kept playing and it felt like we kept our composure on the sidelines and in the game. They’re anxious to get back to work. 

On running backs:

Those guys tend to get beat up. That’s such a punishing position. You ask them to do so much and they’re the ones that are going to carry and touch the ball more than anybody, so you need a bunch of them. We played three, we get Patrick Carr back, and Kelan Walker played six snaps on special teams. He didn’t play at all in camp, he just started practicing a week ago so we’re getting him back. Terrell Brown’s looking good at times, he’s still young. Who ends up playing comes down to who’s available at that position so we’re going to need them all at some point during the year.