Louisiana Tech Bulldogs College Football Pregame Quote, 11/23/2021

On the offense in the Southern Miss game:

Last week’s game was certainly frustrating. I know we’ve had a number of games that have been last play of the game scenarios that we’ve lost on. Those are extremely painful, but this one wasn’t any easier to swallow. I say that because we didn’t play very well as a football team. We’ve just really struggled. There have been some games where we played really well defensively, but couldn’t put the points up we needed to offensively. It’s also been the same vice-versa. When we score 38 points, but we give up 52. We’ve struggled to put a complete team effort together. Offensively, some of that is the number of people that were in and out this week. All of a sudden, Keyon Henry-Brooks was out. Bub Means was out after 10 plays. He was throwing up uncontrollably on the sideline with the little bug from something he ate at some point in time. Tre Harris went out with his ankle. Austin Kendall and JD Head were out. We just had a lot of guys out. We certainly did not click very well offensively. It was lowlighted with a five-turnover day. You’re not going to win many games when you turn the ball over like that. We came out and ran the ball pretty efficiently in the first half. We rushed for 132 yards our way to a 260-yard day. Outside of that, we had four false starts, were 0-for-2 in the red zone, we were 3-out-of-12 on third down, 11-of-26 passing. We certainly weren’t very efficient as an offensive football team.

On the defense in the Southern Miss game:

Defensively, we gave up 28 points but yet we did so many good things on defense. We created three turnovers on defense and had five positive field positions for the offense that we couldn’t capitalize on. We scored on defense. We were 70 percent on third down. You go down and look at it and it was just frustrating. We had 10 tackles for loss on defense. But, we also gave up two deep balls for touchdowns. When you get into a game like that where the offense is struggling, you can’t give up a deep post and you can’t give up uncontested third and goal for 20 yards. It was a frustrating loss. Everybody in the building is embarrassed for the way that we played and some of the things that we did. We know we’ve got to play better coming down the stretch, especially in this final game.

On Rice:

We’re going to play Rice this week. Mike Bloomgren does a really good job with his team. They play extremely hard. Their season, if you look at it, is probably really similar to ours. They had losses early to teams like Arkansas, Texas and Houston. They’ve lost two overtime games in the league. They had last-play losses. They’re playing really hard. They had a quarterback (Jake Constantine) injured last week and Luke McCaffery stepped in. He’s doing more with his legs than Constantine did. They’re solid offensively. They give you a lot of different looks. They’re very multiple from four wides to three tight ends. They give you a lot of different looks that you have to prepare for. It’s the same thing defensively. The strength of the football team is their two interior players are very explosive. When you have a defensive lineman with 60 tackles, he’s making a difference. That’s a lot of tackles for a d-lineman. They have two of them inside that are the backbone of their defense. They’ll play some three-down, some four-down. They play every coverage known to man. There’s an awful lot of things that they throw at you defensively. It ought to be a great challenge for us. I know our team is excited to play this last football game. We have one more opportunity to get it right. It’s been a season of many frustrations from a win-loss standpoint, but for me, I’ve really been proud of the team, the way they’ve stayed together, the way they’ve competed and the way they go out and work every single day. We just got off the practice field this morning and had a really good Tuesday practice in preparation for this week. We’re going to try to put our best foot forward and do everything we can to win this last game of the season and send these seniors out the right way and start to build for 2022.