South Alabama Jaguars College Football Pregame Quote, 10/21/2019

On the Appalachian State game:

The expectations are to go out and play really well on Saturday; let’s get a ‘W’ and go 1-0 this week. Appalachian State is a heck of a football team, they are playing really well right now and they have gotten better as the season as progressed. They gave up some points early in the year, but they’ve been getting better and better on the defensive side. It will be a big challenge for us, but it’s one that we are definitely looking forward to. Regardless of what they are ranked, they are a good football team. In or out of conference, it’s a big football game because it’s the next game. It’s an opportunity for us to play a team that is the defending Sun Belt Conference champion and undefeated right now. We’re looking forward to having a great week of preparation ‚Äì the guys have bounced back strong and had a really good practice Sunday night ‚Äì and a great game on Saturday.

On being able to play looser as an underdog on Saturday:

I thought our guys have been going out and turning it loose the last couple of weeks, we played hard and had a lot of opportunities at ULM and against Georgia Southern and Troy. What we have to do is keep playing better and when an opportunity presents itself we have to go ahead and make the play to put us in the end zone when we get down in the red zone or to make the play to get off the field on third down defensively. There are areas where we have made marked improvement, what we have to do is sustain the things we’ve done better because there are still a lot of things we need to be better at. We need to make some progress and find a way to get a ‘W’ this week against a very good Appalachian State football team.

On what he thinks the team can improve on:

The thing we definitely need to improve on is third down on both sides [of the ball], we need to get off the field defensively and offensively we need to convert. And in the red zone, this past week against Troy we had multiple opportunities inside the three-yard line and weren’t able to cash in on touchdowns. Those are things that definitely could’ve changed the outcome of this past week’s game, and it could’ve changed the outcome of the ULM game.

On how to make those improvements:

We got down there in the last game and miss a block in the red zone, we just have to make the play. You can call a different play, but if you don’t block it I don’t care what play you run. I was beating myself up for not running a quarterback sneak, you’ve got to be able to run that, but I saw a team or two try to run it this weekend and the ball went 99 yards the other way. We have to do a better job of executing, and my job as head coach is to make sure we execute better.