Jax State Gamecocks College Football Pregame Quote, 09/25/2023

I’ve played midweek games back in West Virginia. We were one of the first ones to play on Wednesday night, Thursday night and Friday night games, but not five in a row. Normally you play one or two and then you get back to normal schedule, but we all know and we all agreed to it. It’s going to be interesting and a different dynamic. This is Wednesday for us, not Monday and we adjusted practice schedule because normally they have Mondays off and you got to get one day off a week, so they’ll have Friday off for this week. We’ll have a shorter practice today and a shorter practice tomorrow and then we’ll travel on Wednesday, so your preparation is accelerated. You have to probably simplify things a little bit in all three phases and then you lose one day because you’re traveling on the road on Wednesday. It’s also great exposure for the program.

On Sam Houston:

Sam Houston is extremely underrated. They’re very good defensively, they played a really good Houston team last weekend so they’re very good defensively. I think they’re finding their way on offense and Coach Keller has had great success. I think when we played them a couple of years ago and they killed us, so at least our guys that were on the team then know what kind of program they have.

On the short preparation time:

You can’t have the same schedule obviously in a five-day window and one of them is really a four day window because you’re traveling. Your practice is going be shorter, you won’t have as many individual fundamental time as probably as you normally have. You still have to get your team part in. The biggest part is that we talked about, we got to have a lot of guys ready to play because your depth is going to be an issue because it’s such a physical sport and having that many games that closely guys are going to get banged up and nicked up and don’t have time to come back. Then the conference has a limit, which I never understood. The visiting team has a limit but the home team doesn’t, so it’s like you’re disadvantaged already and then you go on the road and you can only bring so many guys, which is, I guess a cost measure. We’ll deal with that, but I teased the conference, I don’t mind saying this publicly. I mean we got a lot of great people in our conference and they’re doing a great job of building our league, but I kind of teased them about our slogan in the conference slogan, ‘There’s no limits on us, right? Except when it comes to visiting travel squad size but it’ll be fine and Conference USA is in a good spot.

On the Conference USA race:

We’re just now getting into it we obviously had the UTEP game. I really haven’t had a lot of time to look since we haven’t had a lot of inter-conference games. I haven’t watched a lot of film other than Sam Houston right now. Just looking at the scores and I thought this coming into the season, the league was better than their perception was, particularly, you got some teams that are really explosive offensively. I think the league is better than, uh, probably perceived to be but I’ll tell you more in about four or five weeks too. I said this earlier and I don’t mind saying it, to be a true Division I program and team, we’ve got to get bigger. We’ve got to get faster and all that. Uh That’s not to say we can’t compete right now, but we’re not, we’re a couple year years away from where we’re going to be. I’m excited about where we’re going to be. I’m excited where we’re at, but I’m more excited about where we’re going to be when we build this thing.

On Quinton Lane earning a scholarship:

It was during camp and he was getting better and better learning our system. He’s a great young man and Coach Garrett said, coach, he’s going to play for us and we had one available. He was in the two-deep. I had some time right in the middle of camp in August. I said, hey, you know, you’ve, you’ve earned a scholarship and congratulations, obviously that’s kind of a neat moment. I don’t do that publicly even though I was a walk on and earned a scholarship, which was a great thrill for me. I have and I’ve had a special affinity for guys that kind of earned scholarships as walk-ons, but I don’t do it in front of the whole team because I’ve got other walk-ons that probably are deserving as well. I kind of do it privately and come in and let them call their parents and say, hey, you don’t, you don’t have to pay any bills anymore. That’s kind of a neat call, I love that. There’s a lot of parts of my job that is a pain in the butt and don’t really like, but that’s part of my job that kind of makes your whole week when you could bring a young man in and get his mom or dad or both on the phone and say, listen, you don’t have to pay for your schooling and schooling is paid for, we’re picking up the tab and that’s a thrill, that’s a thrill for me and I know it’s a thrill for the players.

On the defense:

I’ve said from the beginning, I was a little concerned with our size but I thought our athleticism was, was really good. We’re, we’re fairly athletic, pretty athletic at every position on the defense. If you look up front, we’re athletic at the linebacker, we got some length and we’re athletic and then our corners played really well. Saturday. We thought our guys are athletic and learning. Coach Ally’s system and there’s a lot to it so it usually takes some time to learn that. Those guys have done a great job with it. when you can play like they did Saturday, we had a pretty good plan but you get a couple of scores up there and if you don’t turn the ball over, you’re going to win it. That’s been the case for us, we can’t turn the ball over and put our defense in a bad spot.”