San Diego State Aztecs College Football Pregame Quote, 09/26/2023

Disappointing result on Friday but the one thing we know, we’ve got a great group of young men. They’re playing hard, and they continue to give effort and they finish well. We have seen improvement every week. That is one of the things that are most important and we’ve got to continue to execute better. And part of that, there’s no excuses. Obviously, we got to do a good job as coaches. We can coach a little better. We have to play a little better. The expectations every week are win, and that’s not going to change. Win on the practice field, win in the classroom, and win out there in game time. There’s a lot that we look forward to, and we’ve had a good week. It’s only been two days, but we’ve had a good week. We had a really good day yesterday. And some of the things that we learned from Friday night’s game we implemented.

On what makes Air Force’s offense difficult to defend:

You don’t see it a lot and it’s always harder when you have good athletes in those positions. I think they’ve recruited very well. The quarterback, he was a track guy also, so when he gets out on the edge, he can go. Offensively, they’re a good football team. There’s enough of the guys who came back from a year ago that we played against. I like playing Air Force, Navy, and Army personally because it exposes your fundamentals, and your discipline with what you want to do.

On if it takes a special coach to be in the environment of Colorado Springs:

Troy is a graduate, and there’s like 11 guys on their staff somewhere through, might be recruiting and might be staff, are all guys who played at the academy. So knowing the expectations and the environment you’re in, I do think that’s something special. I’m proud of the guys that we have on the staff from San Diego State, who are San Diego State grads. Larry Parker and Kyle Spaulding are in our recruiting office now. That really is exciting to me to have those guys here and be a part of something that they do understand.

On if Air Force is harder to defend because they have so many weapons like Brad Roberts:

Well, you have to defend the fullback. What that young man Roberts‚Ķ that guy was a football player. I mean, a bonafide football player, and he was fun to play against. Our guys played pretty well to be honest with you, Jonah Tavai and Banks had their best game in this game a year ago. But you have to stop the fullback. If you don’t stop the fullback, you’re not going to stop the trouble. They have the two guys they’ve been using in there and they are really good.

On the progression of the team’s offense:

I feel our offense has continued to grow. We had one sack last week. We did have three false starts and they were kind of spread around, Armstead had one of them. I think we had five total penalties. One of them was a kick out of bounds. So we’re better in that area. I thought Kenan had some really powerful type runs a couple of times in there, and we just got to take care of the football. It goes back to the same thing: time of possession, which we’ve been good at. Air Force’s last three games had over 36 minutes of time of possession. We’ve got to be good in that area.

On if mistakes are magnified because possessions are limited:

The consistency that you have to have, obviously, in all three phases, but we’ve got to do a good enough job trying to steal possession. If you can do it, number one, create some turnover. They haven’t turned over the ball very much, so create some turnovers that way. In special teams, make sure that you’re defending the field and changing the field position. We got to do a great job with that. So those things to me are really important when you play a team that has spent 36 minutes in the last three games possessing the ball.