UAB Blazers College Football Pregame Quote, 09/03/2019

What a great crowd Thursday night – just really proud of our fans and of course Alabama State traveled well. It was a great night for football and great weather. It was the first game for a lot of our guys and there is a lot to work on. Really proud of our effort but as we know, when we came in on Friday, to a lot of our guys it felt like a loss. It wasn’t a loss, it was a win. There a lot of things to correct. The great thing about playing on a Thursday is it allowed us to come in on Friday and work on UAB. When you come on a Sunday you have to quickly look at you and then move onto the next opponent. Coming in on Friday really allowed us to work on ourselves which I think was important. And then of course Sunday we moved onto Akron.

On an early kick at Akron:

We have been talking about it for a long time. It is an 11 a.m. kick for us, a 12 p.m. kick for them. We have a routine that we go through visiting the stadium. We will get there early on Friday and I think that is important. We are a morning practice tam in the summer. We have to acclimate to the evenings because I like to practice in the morning, but it is trying to do everything we can to get ready for that. To me I would already have had them stay in a hotel if it was feasible. Going through it is going to be a different story.

On the takeaway from the first game:

This group has worked hard and they care, but it is the urgency of games. I have bragged on Alabama State a lot, but from an offensive standpoint, when they play cover zero and load the box, we have to be able to take advantage of that. Give them credit for that. Turnovers are always something we spend time on, so one is too many. We had one on a kickoff return. I think there are specific individual things and then the overview of what a game looks like. The urgency, one mistake gets magnified, what it is looks like on the sideline etc. We had a lot of guys on the sidelines being spectators and we need them involved. We talk about bringing our own energy on the road so we need those guys. It is a bunch of things.

On working on UAB or working on Akron:

It’s both. What do we do to get us better? What moves do we need to make? Who are the best 11 players we can put out there? Who shows up on game night? Those are the things we are looking at. For Akron, it is really easy to say this score equals this, but that is irrelevant. Obviously there has to be some bearing on what you did last week, that’s why there is a winner and a loser, but they are at home, they don’t want to be 0-2. It is totally different at home. We have to get ourselves better and get ready to go on the road.

On Week 2 road losses in the past:

To your point, I think for us [last year], we had an older group that was pretty confident. They watched South Carolina defeat Coastal Carolina pretty handedly. SEC opponent at home. We win comfortably, we were probably a little over confident. That led to what happened at Coastal. That turned out to help us. We went on to win eight straight. I’d rather not go through that again. The game the other night against Alabama State is probably one of the best things that could have ever happened. It shocked us into the real world. ‚ÄòThis is what it looks like, this is what we have been telling you, this is what a bullseye looks like.’ I didn’t see anything yesterday that made it seem like they were looking at Akron’s score. It was more of what do we need to do to get better, and that’s what it should be. Hopefully all of those things will help us leading into this week.

On the players having high expectations:

Yesterday I congratulated Garrett on being named Conference USA Defensive Player of the Week and he says to me, ‚ÄúCoach, I didn’t even play that well.’ That is the mindset you would like everyone to have. I can coach better, they can play better. They have high expectations. We want high expectations. I could sit here and tell you how many guys we lost last year, or that in two years we are going to be good because everyone has experience, but that isn’t who I am and that isn’t who we are. We have talked about it the entire offseason. The only way to do it is to go out there and play. I do like the fact that they have high expectations for themselves. It is a win, but for them to feel like they have a lot of things to do, they know it, they are saying it and that is where we want to live.

On capitalizing on missed opportunities:

We are sitting there in the second half. No offense to Alabama State, but when they have that many guys go down, we have to capitalize. That is why I was so disappointed that we couldn’t do anything with those first two drives to start the second half. There were moments that would have changed the game, but that is us being hard on ourselves and that is where I want to live. When you leave a team in it, that is a receipt for an upset. Hopefully we have learned that you have to put a team away when you have the opportunity, and we had a lot of opportunities.