South Alabama Jaguars College Football Pregame Quote, 08/26/2019

On expectations/goals heading into 2019 season opener at Nebraska:

I’m very excited about the upcoming season. I’ve been excited [for a while] about the opener at Nebraska. If you could draw up a season opener anyway you wanted to, this is the way you would draw it up. You have the chance to open up against a perennial power on national television at 11 a.m. on the opening weekend of college football. Our guys have worked extremely hard. I think they’ve attacked each phase of the offseason with a tremendous attitude and one of getting better every day. That started back in the spring. We had a really good spring, an outstanding summer and the guys have worked tremendously hard throughout [fall] camp. We are really looking forward to the season opener against Nebraska.

On what his message to his team on Saturday will be:

Regardless of who you are opening up against, the next game is always the most important one. It just so happens that we’re opening up against the No. 24 team in the country which happens to be a very good Nebraska football team. What that does is it adds some emphasis to your offseason workouts, which it shouldn’t matter who you’re playing, but in the back of your mind you do know you’re opening up in Lincoln, Neb., in front of 85,000 against a ranked team. All of those things leading up to the season are ramped up just knowing you have an opportunity to do something special the first week out of the gate.

Our big message to our guys this year is ‘One Time’. At South Alabama we’ve been playing football for 10 years. In that 10-year span, we’ve accomplished a lot. We were the fastest program to reach a bowl game after becoming bowl-eligible. We’ve beaten some teams that were ranked in the top 25, but there are still a lot of things that we haven’t accomplished; we haven’t played in a [Sun Belt] conference championship, we haven’t won a conference championship, we haven’t had a winning season yet against Division I competition.

Our deal this year is ‘One Time.’ Let’s put all our eggs in a basket one time, one week at a time for 12 consecutive weeks, and let’s go accomplish some of those goals. Once we’ve done it once, then you can repeat it. At some point and time, we need to win a conference championship, play in a conference championship game, win a bowl game and have that first winning season. All of our focus has been on accomplishing those goals. We can’t accomplish all of those goals this week against Nebraska, but what we can do is take a step towards that. If we’ll focus on doing that one week at a time for 12 consecutive weeks, we’ll have a chance to reach all of those goals. That’s how you establish a tradition and a history, much like the one that Nebraska has. They have as much history and tradition as anyone in the nation. This is the biggest game of the year for us because it’s the next game and it just happens that we’re opening up against Nebraska.

On learning about his team:

You’ve got a good idea of what your guys are capable of doing, but once you play a game against someone else, you’ve got film to know how people are going to try to attack you and how they’re going to try to defend you. Then you can really see where you’re really at and what you’re matchups are. I feel good about where we are. We have several good football players on this team and I know what they are capable of doing. We have some guys who will be stepping into new roles this season and you go into it thinking you know what they’re going to be able to do, but the exciting thing to me is that there are always surprises. With the way this group has worked and the effort and focus they’ve put into it, there are some guys we have out there that don’t know how good they are yet. They just haven’t had the chance to do it on a big stage yet and their opportunity’s coming. I’m excited to watch them play.