Charlotte 49ers College Football Pregame Quote, 10/26/2021

The sun came out on Friday morning, in case you were wondering, I think it was a tough second half for us on Thursday. I take full responsibility for that. It was a tough one to get over. We haven’t been beaten like that in a while, probably since Western Kentucky beat us like this a year ago. You had a lot of really good opportunities in front of you and when you don’t take advantage of them it’s frustrating as a coach to not get our guys prepared to take advantage of that moment ‚Äì then you move forward, it took me really until Saturday morning. It was you know, be the example of positivity, how do we get this football team better, how do we find ways to get this football team to gel and how do we get this football team to work through some of this adversity. I could feel a little bit of a hangover on Saturday with the guys. Yesterday and today ‚Äì today, they were fantastic, unbelievable. I think that sometimes that I’ve gotten so caught up in the process of things and it’s probably been too serious and I’ve wanted them to get back to encouraging one another and have fun playing football because we’re blessed to do what we do. [And] We’re really blessed to learn the lessons that we get to learn from this game. Challenged them, they’ve responded. We’ve got tremendous leadership and now on to an incredible task.

I can’t say enough good things about Tyson Hilton and the program that he’s built at Western Kentucky. Obviously being at Austin Peay, very familiar with the history and they’ve had some great coaches go through there. Tyson’s taken it over and taken it to the next level-done a phenomenal job. He’s changed offensive coordinators, changed their identity offensively. They’re breaking every national statistical record known to man. They’ve got a lot of weapons. They’ve taken an offensive coordinator from Houston Baptist that was tearing up everybody at the FBS level playing teams from Houston Baptist. He brought over his quarterback and a couple wideouts. They’ve taken a transfer back and they did some more transfers wideouts. They’ve had a pretty solid offensive line for a while. I think defensively, they’ve done great job against us the last two years. I know he’s lost his defensive coordinator to South Carolina, but I think they’ve picked up right where they’ve left off. Really solid in all three phases. They’ve played some very good football teams ‚Äì Army and Indiana. I think they played UTSA as tough as anybody played them. [We] had an opportunity to play there and it’s a tough place to play. Great talent, very well coached, got a ton of respect for them. I am really excited to see how our football team responds and how well we can play Saturday.

On responding after a second half shutout:

How does it look? I think it’s the energy you bring into this building. It’s your work ethic at practice, it’s the chip on your shoulder, it’s your motivation to do a little bit more than what you’ve done to get a little bit different result and it’s continuing to harp on the attention to detail on the accountability things that can get you beat in games like that. To me, you hope you’re not at a point right now where you have to hit the reset button and we’re obviously not. When you look at things, you’re 4-3 and 2-1in the conference. You still have a lot of goals and it’s awesome that we’re at a point in time in this program where there’s frustration by being at this point. These guys have created that. You’re a victim and a product of your own expectations that you have created. I know it’s not always been the expectation here. I think it’s keeping those things in perspective. You know we lost a football game and making sure that football game doesn’t get you beat twice. These guys have done an awesome job at that. I worried about it on Saturday. I’m not worried about it anymore by seeing how they’ve worked.

On replicating game speed in practice:

I think that you can practice the speed, but sometimes the speed of your look team, your futures team it’s not executed as well as what you’ll see on Saturday. So, it’s difficult and I think that everybody doing their job to the best of their ability during the week of preparation is really important. I’ve seen full speed game reps show up on the special teams side in the looks these guys are getting, it’s been more difficult for them in practice and they’ve failed at it in practice but in the games have achieved success. So, they’re buying into that and I think that we’ve made unbelievable strides just from a culture and program perspective of getting great looks from our futures teams. But it’s always a little bit different. It goes fast in the game, these guys play really fast and execute really well. It’s this quarterback ‚Äì he’s been in this system awhile. So he knows it, he knows how to execute it. He’s executed it really well. It’s a lot like Chris[Reynolds]. He’s comfortable with what we’re doing offensively. And the players are little bit different. Obviously, they’re starting guys and it’s us going up against our futures team. It’s a little bit different but the speed I think we’re getting ready for. The execution, you got to make sure your look team is doing a good job of finishing plays and executing at a high level.