Charlotte 49ers College Football Pregame Quote, 11/09/2021

Obviously an incredible night on Saturday night, incredible atmosphere. [It’s] really cool to talk about sold out games here. For us to be able to cap off Homecoming week with a win, was big. Incredible resiliency by our guys to find alight at the end of the tunnel, down 24-14 with six-and-a-half minutes to go in the game. [There are] plenty of things to correct and clean up, but really nice to do that after a conference win at home and I’m excited about the progress of this football team. I’ve got a lot to work on, obviously after practice today, just the consistency as you’re getting to week 10 and the monotony of doing the same thing you’ve been doing the last 16 weeks. How committed are we to getting better at the little things so that they pay off whenever it matters? That’s the challenge I have for our football team and the challenge I have for my staff and myself.

We have a really, really difficult match upon the road against Louisiana Tech. There’s some times where I’ve probably talked our team into how good someone else is, and hey, man, they’ve played six one-possession games. Should have beaten Mississippi State, SMU, North Carolina State all those people. It’s not hard to turn the film on on these guys and see how much talent they have. Skip Holtz I think is one of the best I’ve ever been around. He’s a great friend, he’s a great mentor, I call him for advice and I’ve learned a lot from him ‚Äì I just think he does it the right way. Talented football team, going on the road will be a great challenge. I’m excited about having a chance to strap it back up this week, and see how much better we can get. But it’s about winning one game, and that’s all that matters.

On what it will take to put together three, four, five full games to conclude the season:

I think it starts with the consistency of practice. Until we get it right in practice, I don’t know how we can expect to get it right in the game. It’s like the other day, if you don’t turn the ball over twice, then you probably feel really good about where that score ends, and maybe you’re not in heart-attack zone there at the end of the game. We did much better with the penalties, we were only penalized twice, but we turned the ball over twice and then didn’t score in the red zone starting with the ball on the 21 yard-line starting off after the blocked punt. You take those three possessions, which credit to them, they got stops and they got turnovers, then I think you feel a lot better about it. It starts in practice, it’s the consistency, it’s the preparation and it’s the process. We’ve got to get it right during the week before we get it right on Saturday, and we haven’t gotten there yet. The cool part about it is, I want to be playing our best football Week 12. We’re making strides, but we’re not there, and as long as we’re not there, we still have something to work on.