Middle Tennessee Blue Raiders College Football Pregame Quote, 10/28/2019

[Charlotte is] coming off an exciting win for them, a last-second win against North Texas Saturday night, 39-38. They’re sitting record-wise the same as us at 3-5 and coming off a good win, just like we are. I think Charlotte is a really good football team. The staple of their program for a long time since we started playing them is that they play hard, and that’s the same now. You go back to 2015, we scored a bunch of points on them and they were still playing hard. Then in ’16, ’17 and ’18, they did the same. This team really plays hard, so we’ve got to finish. We’ve got to play a little better than what we’ve played. We played a little better Saturday, but we’ve got to continue to build on that. They’ve got the second leading rusher in Conference USA, Benny LeMay. He’s very physical, he runs behind his pads, he’s a really tough, hard-nosed runner. He’s averaging over 100 yards a game in conference play, so he’s really good. They utilize him a lot in the passing game, probably more so than they ever have. He’s a guy that’s very dangerous. Their quarterback, Chris Reynolds, is completing 61% of his passes. He’s got 15 touchdowns and six interceptions. ‚Ķ They’re doing a lot better job of protecting the ball this year. They’re running the ball and protecting the ball, making big plays in the passing game, so it’s a good offense. Defensively, you’re going to get a mixture of fronts, whether it’s three-man or four-man. In coverage, they’ll switch between zone and man, so we’ve got to be able to handle all the pressures they give you. They’re very solid in the kicking game. I sound like a broken record, and I say it every week, but we’ve got to focus on ourselves and be better. We’ve got to improve this week each day ‚Äî individually and collectively as a team, we have to get better. That’s our mindset this week. We haven’t won a game on the road. It’s hard to win games, and it’s even harder to win on the road in a conference game. We’ve got to make sure we’re ready mentally and physically from a toughness standpoint and a preparation standpoint. We’ll get Charlotte’s best effort Saturday.

On the team’s recent success in the month of November:

You hope your team is improving as the season progress. There’s a saying, ‚ÄòYou remember November.’ When you get to the last month of the season, there’s always a lot on the line. We take pride in how we play in November, and it goes back to finishing. You have to finish what you started. I’m proud of our teams. We’ll always fight and compete all the way to the end.

On Charlotte head coach Will Healy:

I thought [former Charlotte head coach] Brad Lambert was a great coach. I have a lot of respect for him, and I thought he did a great job of building Charlotte’s program. When you look at Charlotte when they became Division I and came into our conference, they became better every year under Brad’s leadership. Their administration made a change last year. They won five games last year and were close to being bowl eligible. I thought Brad did a great job of building and laying that foundation. With Will there, I’m not there every day, so I don’t know [what’s changed there]. The team plays hard, they’ve got a good scheme offensively and defensively, and he’s done a nice job in the time that he’s been there. He’s done a good job. What he’s done different, I don’t know, because I’m not there, but the players play hard for him, so he’s doing a good job.

On preparing for the weather during Saturday’s game:

We talked about the weather all week. I told them there was a potential for it to be windy, a potential for rain. We went out Friday in the rain and practiced in it. On Wednesday, I didn’t let our receivers wear their gloves so they could get used to catching the ball with their hands because you’re not going to wear gloves when it’s wet. I got after them a bit at halftime, because we had stunk it up the previous three games ‚Äî Marshall, FAU and North Texas ‚Äî coming out in the third quarter. We had to come out with some juice, some energy. Our leaders, our captains, our seniors, they really did a good job of carrying that message to the field. We talked about not making excuses. When you handle the ball, you have to handle it. We did a really good job. We didn’t have any quarterback-center bad snaps, which I know they did. We didn’t have any fumbles by our quarterbacks or by our running backs; they did. We had a bad snap early in the game on a punt, but that was a bad snap, that wasn’t due to the weather. They had a bad snap in the third quarter, and we got a touchdown out of it. We talked about a mindset of being mentally tough and not making excuses, and we went out there and the offense took it down on the first drive and scored. We did a great job of creating a turnover on the kickoff return, and we got a kick out of that. We scored 10 points and the defense hadn’t been on the field yet. Then the defense came out, and they just continued that relentlessness in how they played defensively in the second half. ‚Ķ We wanted to have a mindset of not making excuses and come out with some passion and energy and play a tough game and not make excuses.

On whether both teams are better than their records suggest:

When you look at it, we’ve played FAU, FIU, North Texas, Marshall. They’ve played FAU, FIU, North Texas, Western Kentucky. We’ve played similar conference opponents. Obviously, our nonconference schedule was a lot tougher than theirs, so we’re very similar in-conference in who we’ve played, and right now it’s two evenly matched teams. The team that protects the ball and goes out there and plays the best in all three phases will have the best chance to win the game, because we’re pretty much the same.

On the confidence gained from running the ball well last week:

You look at the first half, I think we had 178 yards or 175 yards rushing, so we were on track to have a good rushing game. We struggled throwing the ball the first half ‚Äî obviously, we didn’t throw it the second half. We were 5-out-of-10 for 22 yards [passing in the first half], and that’s obviously not very good. We’ve got to get better than that. It was easy ‚Äî maybe easy isn’t the right word ‚Äî but it was a little more convenient to be more one-dimensional in the second half against FIU ‚Äî one because of the score, and two because of the elements. I don’t think we can have that imbalance we had moving forward, so we’ve got to be better in the throwing game and continue to build off the run game, because we have gotten better each week running the ball. Our offensive line has gotten better and our receivers are doing a good job of blocking on the perimeter. Terelle [West] and Jayy [McDonald], hopefully they’ve got a little more confidence coming off the games that they had so that we don’t have to rely as much on Asher [O’Hara] in the run game for production.