Louisiana Tech Bulldogs College Football Pregame Quote, 11/10/2020

On last week:

It was a unique week this week as we thought we were preparing for North Texas after a big win against UAB and coming in and playing a really explosive offensive football team in North Texas. Then on Thursday we got the word that that game wasn’t going to be played. We closed the book, put it into the filing cabinet and said we’re going to have the opportunity to pull that out in December. We immediately got into a little bit of an open date mindset for three days for Thursday, Friday and Saturday. We practiced Thursday and Friday in shorts, and then we came out on Saturday in full pads and really had a physical, long team scrimmage. I wanted to keep them in a mindset of Thursday and Friday were lighter, while Saturday was our heavy day of banging and then Sunday we got right back into our game plan week with Rice. As a coaching staff, we spent some time in some self-scout things. Looking at some things we need to do better. Maybe some tendencies we may have that we need to try and break and what we need to do to give our players a better chance out on the field. Then the second part of that, we started with Rice and getting ready for the game this week. It’s been a crazy season. It’s definitely been unique and it’s definitely been different. There have been a lot of things about it that I’ve really enjoyed having the opportunity to get on the field and play, but there’s a lot of things that are really frustrating as we’ve talked a lot about the lack of development, the lack of growth and all of the spring practices, summer and fall camp where you really have a chance to develop your players. We got as much of that as we could on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

On Rice:

Then getting ready for Rice this week. Mike Bloomgren’s done a great job there. He’s been there now going into his third year. You can really start to see his stamp on everything. They’re a very physical football team both on the offensive and defensive lines. They have great balance this year in what they’re trying to do this year on offense. They have a transfer quarterback who has a big arm who is throwing for about 230 a game. They’re rushing for about 190 a game. They have balance as a football team in both run-and-pass. They have bigger sets. They give you multiple formations. They’re going to challenge our defense with all the different sets and formations that they give you and then what they do. Once you get your safeties involved in the running game, they’re good enough outside. Their wide receiver (Austin Trammell) is explosive. He’s caught twice as many passes as anybody else. Their second and third leading receivers are their tight ends. They are a good offensive football team and they’re scoring a lot of points. They are in the top three or four in pretty much any offensive category in our conference right now after two games playing Middle Tennessee and Southern Miss.

Defensively, same thing. Last year, this was a 23-20 overtime win for us at their place. We had to fight for every point and every yard we got. They are very physical upfront. There’s 10 guys that played against us last year that are starting on this defense, so they have a football team that’s very experienced. They’ve had a lot of time together. They are playing very well together. They’re very physical. It’s going to be a great challenge for us. We’re excited we have the opportunity to play at home in an afternoon game. It’s supposed to be a beautiful day at 75 degrees, sunny, Red Out. We’re just looking forward to what we need to do to get everybody ready to play this week and go out their and compete against Rice on Saturday.