Middle Tennessee Blue Raiders College Football Pregame Quote, 11/08/2021

Really looking forward to this week, [I’m] excited about it. We’ve got FIU coming in here, and this is always a tough, competitive close game. Last year it went down to the last minute of the game and that’s what’s anticipated this year. Their record is not very good, but they’ve lost some close games. Their guys are still playing hard and that’s a credit to their players and their coaches in how well they’re competing and how hard they’re playing. Their quarterback I think is a really, really good player. He can throw the ball, he’s a pocket guy who has a really good release and strong arm. It appears to me that he’s getting better and better each week. He’s an accurate quarterback and has done a nice job. Their running back, we saw him last year, we scored and he took the next play 63 or 65yardsfor a long touchdown run. They ran the ball for almost 300 yards on us last year, so we’ve got to stop the run and we can’t give up explosive plays defensively and to me, that’s where it starts on that side of the ball.

Offensively for us, obviously we’ve got to eliminate the turnovers that we had, and I’m very confident that we will. We showed some signs throughout that game last week that we were doing some good things, but just weren’t consistent enough because of the turnovers, so we’ve got to eliminate those. [In] the kicking game, they’ve got a really, really, really special punter, so we’ve got to be able to handle that. They run a lot of fakes in the kicking game and we’ve got to be ready for that, so again, you don’t look at the record, you worry about yourself and we’ll have a great week of practice and be ready to play there Saturday afternoon.

On how to bounce back after a tough loss:

Each game is a season in itself and whether you win or whether you lose, you’ve got to flush it. You can’t beat your chest for six or seven days when you win, and you can’t step on your lip when you get beat for six or seven days. You’ve got to look in the mirror and get better, and come out and work and correct our mistakes. The leadership of our team is excellent, we’ve got good guys that care and we’re going to bounce back this week. We had a good practice yesterday and I have no doubt that tomorrow we’ll have a good practice, as we will the rest of the week. Again, it’s coach clich√© stuff, every coach in America says it, but you’re just trying to win one game this week and that’s all our focus is ‚Äì on FIU and we’re not gonna look back and we’re not gonna look past. We focus on FIU and get ready and play this game.