South Alabama Jaguars College Football Pregame Quote, 11/11/2019

On the challenge of facing Louisiana this weekend:

Big week this week for us. We get to play the team that’s leading the Western Division. They’re an outstanding team and one that’s been playing really well on both sides of the ball really all season, but especially the last couple of weeks. We’re looking forward to a great game against a very good Louisiana football team.

I thought our guys played really hard this past week [against Texas State]. We had a couple of opportunities to win the game, but unfortunately the other team made one more play than we did and we came up short. We’ll learn from that. There are a lot of good things that we can take from the film and improve upon to hopefully make that one more play that can put us over the top. I like the way that we were better on our third-down situations, which left us on the field and gave us a chance to score some points. We were also a little bit better in the red zone where we were able to score some touchdowns. We need to continue to improve on those things in order to have an opportunity this week against a very tough Louisiana football team.

Offensively, they’ve got some of the best running backs in the league; they’re averaging a lot of yards per carry and they can really run the football. This past week, their quarterback, who’s played well all year, really did an outstanding job of throwing the ball and getting it to their receivers. Over their last couple of weeks they’ve held their opponents to a combined 10 points ‚Äì Texas State [3] and Coastal Carolina [7] ‚Äì so they are very good defensively.

On his thoughts on how Desmond Trotter ran the offense and his decision making:

I thought Desmond did an outstanding job this past week with it being his first start. He did a good job of getting the ball to the receivers out in space. He did a good job with the RPO game and he converted some third downs. He did a good job of pulling the ball down and running it whenever the pass wasn’t there and he felt pressure. We were able to keep the chains moving. I like the way he protected the football; we didn’t have a turnover and that was big for us. For his first start out of the gate as a freshman, I thought he did an outstanding job.

On his message to the team after the tough loss:

You can’t just love football when everything is going well. If you love football, you love football whether it’s going well or it’s not going well. One of the things that I was taught by my coaches and I’ve always believed is that the game of football is a microcosm of life and you can learn so much through it. Unfortunately right now, we’re going through some adversity, but there’s a lot of opportunity in front of us where we can learn from it. Life’s not always rainbows, popsicles and cotton candy. How do you respond whenever things don’t go your way? It’s not so much what happens to you, but how you respond to it.

We’ve had a tough year and we had a tough year before this last game, but I like the way our guys have responded. The guys are giving great effort. I thought we played extremely hard until the last play of the game against Texas State. That’s my challenge. There were some things that we got better at this past week. Desmond got in there and gave us a spark; we were able to put some points on the board. Tre’ Hamilton made a play. Jalen Wayne made a play. I thought Carlos [Davis] stepped up and made a couple of big runs. We’ve got some guys that are stepping up and making plays that haven’t necessarily made plays in the past. That’s big. We need more and more guys to continue to step up and make plays.

That’s my message. Regardless of circumstance or whatever, just keep grinding and keep chopping wood because I know we’re going to get there. We’ve got really good young men on this football team, there’s good talent on this team. We’re a young football team. Let’s take advantage of the situation we’re in right now and learn from it, because there will be a day when we can fall back on the lessons we’ve learned if we approach it the right way and finish.