South Alabama Jaguars College Football Pregame Quote, 09/30/2019

On Georgia Southern:

Georgia Southern has an outstanding football team. What they do offensively with that triple option makes it imperative that we have a great week of practice, especially on a short week. Defensively they have a lot of very good athletes and a lot of speed, they do a good job of pressuring the quarterback and they have been very successful against the run this year. Louisiana-Lafayette was able to move the football, they did some things on the ground and then hit some play-action passes to do a good job of controlling their option game. That’s what is going to be key for us this week, controlling the football and trying to keep Shai Werts on the sideline; he is a very dangerous quarterback, he was a little banged up earlier in the year but they got him back this past week. It is going to be crucial for us to stop all three phases of the triple option.

On having a short week to prepare for the next game:

We’re anxious to get back out on the practice field and to play a home game. Any time you’re coming off of a defeat, you are anxious to get back out there as quickly as you possibly can to get that bad taste out of your mouth. There were some things that happened in this past week’s game that we can build off of. The first drive was as good a drive as we’ve had this season, we took it down and converted some big plays; I thought we protected the quarterback well, ran the ball physically and Cephus did a good job in the option game. Defensively on the first drive we got off the field, one of the things we had emphasized from the week before was being able to get off the field on third down. The second drive we took the ball down the field and had the turnover in the red zone, of course that is something you can’t do against a good football team. There were some definite things to build off of last week and some things that we can definitely look at and see we need to improve on in order to beat a good football team, and Georgia Southern is definitely a good football team. We had really good meetings last night, our players saw the things that we can control.

On Cephus Johnson:

I think he is growing each week and gaining more confidence as he goes. I read something the other day that makes sense ‚Äî you can’t give a guy confidence, you can give a chance to earn it. He did some good things this past week. I thought he ran the triple option really well, and there was a third down and we ran a quarterback draw, he pulled it down and had a very physical run to get us the first down. On the last scoring drive, we were in the red zone and he ran a quarterback draw and made the safety miss and took it in for a touchdown. With each time that Cephus steps out there I think he is gaining a little more confidence. Obviously we are not where we want to be offensively as a unit yet, and as we get better up front I think that will give him more opportunities to help grow in his confidence. He is progressing and getting better each week, we just need to keep chopping wood.

On battling adversity:

One of the reasons I like football is because it’s a microcosm of life, it really is. You are going to go through adversity and have things not go right, but you just have to keep going. When you do go through it, you keep going and learn from it both in football and in life. You get back to work and keep improving; you control the things you can control. The things we can control are getting better each day, make sure when we report each day, whether it’s practice or at meetings, it’s important that we improve each and every day. We’ve got great young men in our program who have great character. We’re a young football team right now. We just need to keep getting better and eventually we’re going to break through that threshold, and we’re close. We just need to focus on doing the things that will put ourselves in position to be successful. We’re making some improvements each and every week. We need to make a good little bit of improvement before Thursday, because we’ve got a very good Georgia Southern team to play and we’re going to be ready for them.