Jax State Gamecocks College Football Pregame Quote, 10/31/2023

It’s different now for us after our reality show, the five-week reality show is over and now it’s a normal Saturday. It’s not normal when you’re playing an SEC team on the road, but at the same time it’s a great opportunity. There’s obviously some big challenges in front of us on Saturday but playing an early kickoff, noon kickoff for us and for me, I’m excited about that – get up and play and I think our guys will be excited too. If you polled most of our players, it’s like, yeah, I love playing an SEC team or playing against the best to measure themselves and that’s what they get a to do this weekend.

On South Carolina:

It’s the most talented team we’ve played since I’ve been here. I don’t think it’s even close on both sides of the ball. They’ve lost some tough games., they’re up 14 3 on the defending national champions in Georgia and everybody knows how good they are and they lost a close one to Florida. They lost a couple of other close ones, so they’re better than the record. Our guys know the challenge. The one thing about our team of a handful of seniors, we got a bunch of juniors, they’re pretty mature as a group. The biggest thing for us is we got to control the game and we can play better than what we have been. We’ve got to continue to play hard and not worry about the scoreboard. Don’t look up there until the end of the fourth quarter to see what happens.

On USC QB Spencer Rattler:

With Spencer (Rattler) it seems like he’s been there forever. He’s a talented guy, but he’s also been in their system for several years now. I think he’s playing really good football. He’s a competitive guy and it’d be fun to watch if you weren’t playing him. I think he’s a NFL guy and, the biggest thing for us defensively probably is that you to try to get them into some predictable situations, third and long and that is for every team you play that if you can get them in third long and then you can do some your stuff defensively. Our defense is we’re not very big but we’re pretty athletic and when we get them into some third and long stuff, our athleticism can help out a little bit there but that’s easier said than done.

On having RB Ron Wiggins back:

Ronnie came out of it (the FIU Game) good, which is good because Ronnie’s probably our, you know, he’s not, probably, he’s one of our fastest guys and, you know, he was itching to get back here and, uh he gives us, you know, another dimension when he’s, when he’s playing running, we play a lot of running backs with Ronnie’s probably our fastest