Marshall Thundering Herd College Football Pregame Quote, 10/26/2021

I didn’t get to go home last year because of COVID and that plays a huge effect on the mental wellness and just the grind of a season when you have to go however many weeks without going to see your family, your family not being able to come to games, those different things and living in a virtual world. It was good for the guys to see their families. I know some of the guys got back to their high schools and saw some high school football games. I did talk to the guys. You can lose a bye week and they looked at me like, ‘What are you talking about?’ But when you do get a break, the beauty of the college football season, you kind of keep these guys together but when you do get a break as a coach you are concerned because you send kids across the country, not only are there COVID concerns, knock on wood we’ve been blessed to kind of avoid, but just the normal travel, you’re going home, you’re hanging with your friends, you’re with the wrong crowd or you’re with somebody and something goes down.

I’ve been on the negative side of those things before. We talked about not losing the bye week, not going home and getting caught up in anything that you may not be able to control, not going home and not being cautious about COVID protocols and bringing something back, not taking advantage of the free time to be able to get ahead of your academics, not taking care of the free time to rehydrate and reenergize your body and our guys did a really good job at that. We came back, everybody was back healthy, and everybody was back on time. We had a really good practice yesterday. Got an opportunity to get a head start a little bit last week on FIU, [we] started yesterday and we’re off to a good head start. And with that I’ll open it up to questions.

On FIU:

The one thing that I’ve learned in this conference especially and really all over college football, the record is not an indication of the team that’s going to hit the field. This is another week and you say it every week, this another week of a team’s record that’s not indicative of the talent they have on the team, how close they are in games, it’s kind of the same story we’ve told about ourselves. A play or two here, a turnover or less here, a missed tackle there and it changes not only the dynamic of a game but a whole season.

So, FIU’s coming in offensively really explosive. They make a lot of big plays down the field, I think, their quarterback does a really good job of throwing the deep ball. You can tell he understands the system, he distributes the ball where it needs to go. They’ve got two really big backs that do a really good job at running downhill with power, they’ve got enough speed to break the long ones.

Defensively, they’re really sound. They do a really good job up front. From the linebacker perspective to the safety perspective, they really force you to distribute the ball in the pass game to the right areas. They force you to do a really good job of combo in your run game because they do a good job of getting off blocks.

Special teams-wise, they’ve got a good punter. He’s flipping the field for them-which is allowing them, they’ve got really good speed which is allowing them to get off and cover which is putting offenses in some difficult predicaments field position-wise.

Another phenomenal challenge for us, not only playing FIU but coming off the bye week – are we a mature enough team to continue progressing or are we satisfied is what I asked the team in the meeting. ‘Are we satisfied?

We came back in the ODU game and we played well at the North Texas game. Are we satisfied? Or are we continuing to use the experiences of ‘The Three’?’ We talk about ‘The Three’ in our building all the time. The three games where went into the locker room and we didn’t get the results we wanted. Can that feeling motivate us to do the things we need to do to get the results we want this week. It’s the only week that matters.

FIU is going to present a tremendous challenge. We got them home, hopefully The Joan will be rocking. I can’t wait to see the student section again. We haven’t been home for a while, it seems like, but it’s going to be a tremendous challenge. Are we mature enough to continue to progress?

On handling FIU’s running backs defensively:

It starts with gap control. That’s the first thing, everybody’s got to be in their gap. The football gods and the football itself has a funny way of finding the gap that’s open. We’ve got to have gap control and everybody’s got to play their gap. Everybody’s got to trust that the man next to them is playing their gap. Then what we’ve got to be able to do is tackle and that’s the one thing that’s tripped us up in some games earlier in the season. We’ve got to be able to tackle well and that’s not just coach speak. You’ve got to sink your hips, roll your hips, wrap the guy up, and you have to run your feet. You can’t just throw your shoulder into the guy ‚Äì to me that starts in practice.

When you’ve got your scout team, we don’t tackle every day in practice for obvious reasons but you have to practice the right fundamentals. You got to sink your hips, shoot your hips, you got to wrap the guy up, and you got to run your feet. You have to do that consistently throughout practice, so that when you do get in the games it’s something you’ve done in practice all week.

So, those two things to me are going to be huge, gap control and actually tackling, which sounds simplistic in football but in the college and NFL game you don’t do it every day. It’s a little bit different when [WSAZ Sports Director] Keith [Moreland] played back in the day. They tackled every day, they didn’t have a face mask, they just tackled, CTE probably set in and all that stuff. But know we’ve changed the rules a little bit. We don’t do that as much.

So it’s something you have to practice the habits of, so that when you get in the game it’s something you can do consistently.