UTEP Miners College Football Pregame Quote, 09/03/2019

I’ll start off by just talking about the game day environment. It was a great environment. The crowd was really into the game and we had a great turnout. We are thankful for that and it was neat to have everyone there at the stadium. We want to make sure everyone comes back out to watch us against Nevada. That is going to be a huge game for us.

With the tribute we did for Luke (Laufenberg), it was really an emotional week for us last week. After going to speak at the funeral on Wednesday, it was really a beautiful day, a very rewarding day and a great tribute to a wonderful life that Luke had. We are going to do an endowed scholarship moving forward, which is something that should be very successful in memory of Luke. I am just looking forward to growing that into something that is very fruitful in memory of a guy who was and is just a great part of our football team.

Each week now, we have the hustle awards on both sides of the ball that we will call our ‘Luke Laufenberg Awards’ for our players. Just to kind of indicate how important of an award that is, we gave the ones on offense to Brandon Jones and Zuri Henry for stalking down that corner on the two-point play. What a great effort that was. We teach the quarterback to pursue the football after interceptions, so obviously that paid off there. And then Zuri Henry almost ran their corner down himself as an offensive lineman, so we thought that was great effort on that play. But that is the ‘Luke Laufenberg Awards’ we will give out each week to our players on offense as well as defense and special teams.

Recapping Houston Baptist:

The game gave you everything you wanted to see. There was a lot of excitement out there and it was very frenetic at times with some dramatic plays. I talk about wanting to eliminate unforced errors. Obviously, early in the third quarter we had a couple there. But the big thing that any coach would want to have happen is for your team to experience adversity and still win a football game. I was really happy about that part of it. I saw a lot of first games this year with a lot of undisciplined play. I thought we had some penalties. It was not perfectly clean, but also not one of those games where you say penalty-wise we were really undisciplined with what we did.

Moving forward, I just hope we can continue to reduce the amount of unforced errors because there definitely were too many of those. I think it is a tribute to our guys taking a step in the right direction and finding a way to win a game. There were a lot of positives. I like the balance of what we did offensively.

Defensively, I was really pleased with the way we played in the red zone. We had trouble handling the tempo, which I had talked about being a concern. I said the tempo was a concern for us because you just can’t emulate that in practice. It did show up and it was an issue for us. Obviously, we needed that work and got it, so it was a good workout for us and a good way to adjust to it, so it will help us moving forward. I felt like we tackled pretty well. I don’t think our tackling was poor by any means for the first game. They created some big plays on us by just throwing the ball deep and making some really nice football plays.

On facing Texas Tech this week:

They only ran 95 plays last game, so they didn’t get to work much on their offense last week. It is as fast as we’ve gone up against. Every 18 seconds, they run a play, so they are snapping the ball. Their offensive linemen are sprinting up to the line of scrimmage and then running the next play. Like I said, it is as fast as I have seen. It is very indicative of the Baylor offenses. That is who they remind me of right now with what they are doing, which we faced quite a bit at Kansas State. We have seen this style of offense. We have seen this tempo and been around it for a while. It is a really difficult challenge. They had like 691 yards against Montana State, 436 of it was passing. They were good on third down. They created some big plays in the pass game, created some big plays in the run game. Their quarterback does a really nice job with what he does.

Defensively, they are led by No. 1, their linebacker Jordan Brooks. He is an outstanding player. Their two defensive ends are really good players as well. Their other linebacker, No. 6, is a very good player who has played quite a bit for them. They have some good experience on defense and had some good numbers against Montana State.

It is going to be a huge challenge for us. It is going to be a fun challenge for us to go play in Lubbock, which is always a good environment to play in. It has always been a tough place to play and they always play well at home. They are a good home football team.