Charlotte 49ers College Football Pregame Quote, 09/14/2021

Excited to be back with you again today talking about another big week. Like I said Saturday night, proud of our guys for taking care of business. I think there were plenty of things on film that we were able to work on and areas of improvement. I’ve said every week I’ve been up here, I think the key to our success is finding ways to get better and better each and every day that we’re out there. These guys did an excellent job today of taking advantage of a difficult Tuesday practice, a full-padded, physical practice. [I’m] excited about the opportunity this week to play a great football team, and I mean that. These guys have had two really difficult games starting off with Army and North Carolina, but it’s not hard to turn their film on and see the talent that’s running all over the field.

I think that John Elliott is an unbelievable coach, I’ve known him for a long time, I know about him. I think he does it the right way, he’s built a really good program in Atlanta and has had a lot of success. It’s our first road test of the season, so I’m excited about the challenge, I really am, because this will tell us a lot about our football team. The week of preparation will be important, and I’m proud of how our guys have moved on and responded, and they’re hungry to go find other opportunities win football games.

On what they can improve on from the Gardner-Webb win last week:

To me, I thought we had the one series on defense where it didn’t look like we played real hard, and that’s not acceptable. An effort portion of this program is not going to be tolerated, so we’ve got to figure out the why. Why did that happen? Did we take a deep breath? Relax? Were we tired? What is it? I think that there are plenty of things. You’re talking about 11 guys doing the right thing on each play, and so it’s a guy here and there that is off, or doesn’t execute his assignment properly. When you’re talking about 160-170 plays in a game, you’re going to be able to find one in every one of them. It’s not necessarily one glaring thing, it’s just executing at a higher level, making sure that we’re playing extremely hard and attention to detail, communication-driven and making sure that we’re lined up properly and executing our assignment.

On some younger players getting opportunities last week:

I’m really excited about those young wideouts who got time, and not just at the end of the game. I’ve said for a long time that I think Elijah [Spencer] and Nono [Jairus Mack] have a chance to be special wideouts here. Continuing to find roles for them is important. They’re practicing at a really high level, and again, when you have Vic Tucker as a standard, it helps. It was important to get James[Foster]in, and not in the fourth quarter, but let him play almost a half of football. I know he wishes he had the throw to Vic back, where I think Vic probably has an opportunity to score on the scramble, but I thought he did some good things. We messed up the snap a couple times with him and weren’t able to execute the play properly. Then he dropped one, so just getting him to calm down a little bit and then also giving him something to fight for. I think any time you get into the game and we get to grade you off of game film, it helps push you and helps you understand what you need to work on if your number is called.

The hard part about that game to be honest with you, let’s say it’s the fourth quarter and there’s four minutes remaining. Do you put a true freshman in the game to play six, seven snaps knowing that the game’s out of hand? Or some of those freshmen defensive linemen, like Miguel Jackson, he may have to play for us this year. So when you start talking redshirts and things like that, I didn’t want to use it up just late in that game, I wanted to make sure they were going to be guys who are going to be playing for us. But again, to hold them scoreless on the defensive side of the ball in the second halfis a big deal, so those young guys who stepped in did a great job. I would have liked to put some more points on the board, seen James get into the end zone, but we came up just short of that, so we’ve got some work to do with that second group.