Charlotte 49ers College Football Pregame Quote, 10/22/2019

Excited to be back at home. It feels like forever, been almost a month, so we have had two long road trips and neither one panned out the way that we wanted them to. I am very excited about where this team is headed. And I know that is crazy to say after losing four straight but our practices have been really good and this football team is getting better. Nobody feels sorry for us. We are coming up against a great North Texas team this weekend. Seth Littrell is one of the best coaches in college football and a really good friend of mine. I know those guys are going to be ready. They got a huge win last weekend against Middle Tennessee. They have the quarterback (Mason Fine) healthy and that’s where it starts for them. He’s a great player. We have another huge test in front of us this weekend and we are ready for the challenge. This is a team that was picked to win the league for a reason. Our work is cut out for us. Our guys had a great practice this morning (Tuesday) and I’m excited to see how we’ve improved this week.

North Texas is a team that has a lot of big yardage plays. How are you going to prepare for that?

Yeah, it’s a really tough matchup for us. It all starts with the quarterback; he’s a great player and if you blitz him, he throws it out to their wideouts in space who can make you miss. You let him sit back there and pick you apart and he can throw the football anywhere on the field. He’s competitive and tough, takes hit after hit and keeps getting up. It takes a lot for him to miss plays, and obviously, he missed a lot of plays against Southern Miss and was banged up there but he looked really good last week. They lost an all-conference, All-American wideout last year and have had other guys step up and made a lot of plays after the catch. And then they have some young wideouts that are long, athletic and it seems that he is starting to find his groove with them, too.

Running the football, I think the two backs they have are really talented. They have both been banged up. I don’t think either one of them played last week and now it seems they are both back healthy and will play this week. Offensively, I think they are really good, really explosive and can beat you in a multitude of ways. But, I know the weaknesses of our defense. I know where we struggled in the past and to think these guys aren’t going to come out and try to exploit that weakness is ignorant. And we need to fix some things in house first.

Talking about the defense, how is Charlotte preparing to attack this North Texas offense?

I think preparation is in the film room and in practice. We have to get great looks in practice. I think the scout team looks really good; the film preparation has been good; and we have to understand tendencies. I think that the plan for success doesn’t change. We know it’s an explosive offense that can score on every play but we have to get 11 hats to the ball and get pressure on them and getting guys down when they have the ball.

Benny LeMay has touched the ball 111 times in this season but only six times in the fourth quarter this year. What can you do to get him the ball later in games?

I think it has a lot to do with trailing. We have trailed a lot late in games, too much in the fourth quarter; the other ones were when we were leading so we pulled him. I think it has been a lot of different things but we would love to be in a barn burner and have to hand the ball off to him and feel good about our chances if we do that. I can promise you it’s not schematic or a game plan thing; it’s just how the games have gone.

Off of that, he would provide you a way of keeping North Texas off the field if you were able to control tempo, right?

Absolutely. I think that is important to us every week; keeping the opponent’s offense off the field is a point of emphasis ‚Äì winning the time of possession, not turning the football over ‚Äì have to be staples of our offense and we’ve been able to do that well. And when we haven’t, we have gotten into some trouble.

The past three games you have six combined points in the fourth quarter. Do you think the halftime adjustments are throwing the offense off?

I think some defenses have worn us down. That happens when you have a lack of depth but I think a part of it is attention to detail and I think WKU has a phenomenal defense. I do think they got the best of us in the second half, and honestly, I feel like they got the best of us after our second touchdown. And they responded very well, and when you don’t hit on some of the shots when they are called, then you are going to be down 14 but it very easily could’ve been 21 or 28 if we hit some of the receivers down the field. They hit on their trick plays; we didn’t hit on ours. They had guys wide open; we didn’t have guys wide open. That’s what good football teams do. Add a turnover and a blocked punt to that and what happened on Saturday is what is going to happen the rest of the year if we continue to do what we did Saturday. We have very small room for error right now and we aren’t making up for it in out-physicalled people or out playing them. We have to make the plays when they are there. We can’t be down 10-1 in the penalty perspective; we can’t hurt ourselves. When we have, we have put ourselves in a hole and it’s very difficult to climb out of.