Middle Tennessee Blue Raiders College Football Pregame Quote, 08/29/2022

Thank you guys for being on, exciting week. A lot of energy, a lot of butterflies, a lot of nerves, excited about opening up the season. As I’ve said throughout the summer, we had a good summer, we had a good August camp, we had a good week last week, andtoday’s our day off, so we’ll start preparations for James Madison again tomorrow.

I’m really excited about our team, I like the leadership of our team, I like where we are. We still have some question marks that we’ve got to get solidified in the next couple of days. But I like where we are and our players are excited for this opportunity. We’re playing a really talented James Madison team that went 14-2 last year, got beat in the semifinals by the eventual national champion. They’ve got an almost 1,000-yard rusher returning, he had 975 yards. A 1100-yard receiver who caught 83 balls and had 13 touchdowns. They’ve got a transfer quarterback that threw for 2500 yards, and then their offensive line, all those guys have all started for a long time. They’re an experienced, talented offensive unit that’s had a lot of success.

Defensively, they led their conference in takeaways, I believe they had 32 last year. No. 1 in third down defense, in the top three in rushing defense, pass defense, total defense, so it’s a talented team. Really good in the kicking game, they had maybe two, maybe three kickoffs returned for touchdowns last year.

This is their first game as a full-fledged FBS team. I know they’re going to be excited about opening up at home. It’s a great challenge for us, we’ve got to be ready to go.

On how smooth he expects JMU’s FBS transition to go:

I think it’ll be pretty seamless for them, because they’ve had so much success at the FCS level. Winning national championships, playing in the national championship game, going to the playoffs on a consistent basis. I like their transition, a lot like App State and Georgia Southern in the sense that they’ve been playing for a long time and now (they’re) making the next move to FBS.

Unlike other teams, and I said this earlier today, when Charlotte came into Conference USA, I think it was in 2015, they had just started football. Maybe 13 and 14, 12, 13 and 14, they had just started. Any time a program is just now starting college football or restarting college football back, their transition’s a little bit harder than what an App State, a Georgia Southern and now a James Madison is going to experience, because they have all the foundation in place. The stadium, the facility structure, all of those things are in place, and they’ll just build on top of that moving forward.

On the challenges of a Week 1 scout due to transition:

Any time there’s an opening game, there’s always a lot of concern because you don’t know what changes they made schematically with their team. You don’t know who’s replacing who from a talent standpoint. But they’ve got seven returners starting on offense. They lost a receiver, they lost a quarterback, so they’ve got a lot of guys coming back offensively.

But defensively, you don’t lead the league with only 11 people playing. A lot of those guys who may not have started last year played a bunch of snaps. They got a transfer from Marshall, a defensive lineman who’s played against us and played very well against us. We’re familiar with him. But they’ve got a very good program, with good players. They may have lost a couple of guys on defense, but I promise you the guys they’re replacing them with are very talented young me.

On the challenge of hitting the road Week One for a game that’s going to be emotionally charged:

When you go on the road, you’ve got to pack an extra bag of toughness. And probably the mental toughness is as important if not more important than the physical toughness. This is the first time a lot of these guys have gotten on a plane. You’re going to a different hotel. You’re going into a different venue where you’re not going to be cheered, you’re going to be booed. And you’ve got to be able to handle the noise and the distraction.

We know they’re going to be amped up. It’s their first game, and on top of it, for their fans, it’s their first game that they can say they’re an FBS fan. The mental toughness is the thing we’ve got to be as cognizant about in handling this environment.