UTEP Miners College Football Pregame Quote, 08/28/2023

I thought that was a challenge for us this weekend. I think we matured from the trip. Obviously having to go on the road in the conference opener matures your football team pretty quickly. The elements weren’t great for us, I’m not making excuses, I’m getting to the end of a means here.

We probably sweated more in the locker room than we had sweated at any time because of the humidity in just getting ready for the game. I thought our guys handled all that really, really well. We didn’t have one guy get a cramp. We didn’t have one guy have to take himself out of the game for any type of heat exhaustion or any type of issues that came from the humidity or any of that stuff. That told me a lot about the conditioning of our football team and where we are. I think it’s important for us to do that.

I think it was a tough road trip. I think we played a good football team. There’s no doubt that Jax State is a good football team. There were some statistics on them on PFF about being one of the top-10 defensive football teams in the country last year. We knew it was going to be a hard-fought football game for us.

The more I watched the film, the better I think our team played. I don’t have any qualms or questions about what kind of football team we have this year from this game at any time. Why we didn’t win the game is because we turned the ball over three times and didn’t cause any turnovers. That’s one reason. We didn’t finish our drives and score touchdowns when we needed to finish drives. We weren’t very good from the 45 to the 30 (plus 45 to plus 30). We weren’t very efficient in all in that area. We gave up a big sack in a situation and defensively didn’t create enough negative yardage plays. Those are the categories that I look at.

We didn’t have very many penalties, but we had two costly penalties. Two of them were to keep drives alive that they ended up scoring on. So, those were costly penalties. In a game like that, you got to be pretty much flawless because it was a very competitive game.

Obviously, we talked about starting fast. We made an attempt to start fast with the first drive and had the big play that ended up being overturned. That was really unfortunate for us. One of the issues at most of our games (is that) we don’t have enough replay cameras and sometimes you want to have more replay cameras. This game there were 11 replay cameras. So, I’ve never been at a game with more (cameras) since we’ve been here at UTEP. Obviously, through the use of the replay camera they saw something that overturned a huge momentum shift in the game. That led to us not responding.

We went for it on 4th-and-2 there at the 47-yard line, which was an aggressive play. Aggressive plays are good when they work and they’re not good when they don’t work. We didn’t convert right there, and that ended up being a big part of the game because it got them on the scoreboard first instead of us on the scoreboard first in that area of the ballgame right there.

As it comes to find out, every point was really crucial in that football game. Every possession was very, very crucial in that football game. So, because we didn’t do well in that setting and situation before you know it, we’re moving the ball, but we’re not putting points on the board, and they get another touchdown and now they’re up 10-0. Now we’re fighting from a 10-0 deficit.

The drive we put together at the end of the half was really good. We maximized every second of that drive and got the ball in the end zone and got momentum back. We felt really good going into halftime, not happy being behind, but felt good that the game was right we wanted it because we deferred to win the toss and come out in the second half and have an opportunity there to get a good drive going.

We started off really well. Then we had a pass play that was called, and it wasn’t called into a great look. It wasn’t a very good look on the pass play, but Gavin knows better and he kind of forced it in there because he has to hit the timing looks. In retrospect he knows, and we all know that there can be better decision making in that situation there. You (can) dump the ball in the back or pull it down and run. That was a big turnover in the game right there. That was, to me, a little bit of an unforced error. Not a completely unforced error, but it was dramatic because I thought we were driving and had a chance to take the lead.

The game kind of went back and forth there for a while, and then they got another score to take it to 17-7. I was happy again the way our team responded, fought ourselves back in, got a good drive and scored on that long pass play.

We felt like we had really good matchups of our receivers against their corners all day. We felt like we were winning on that matchup. The second touchdown that we scored, we got a good matchup with Kelly (Akharaiyi) and got the game back under control. We played good football after that.

We put together a really good last drive that started with four and a half or 4:40 left on the clock and had a good drive going there. We got down to 3rd-and-1. We went out and got into a two tight end formation. I gave Gavin (Hardison) a green light that we could run the ball there, but if he gets press coverage out there, we felt like we could run by their guys to go ahead and take a shot.

Your thoughts in that situation are you got a minute and 20 seconds to score. The quickest way to do it is to get them to really squeeze down and try to condense your run game on third and short. We got a really good match up there and got pretty much the same play we had run earlier that we threw for the touchdown. Kelly had his guy beat by a couple of yards on that and the ball just kind of floated over his shoulders. He had to whip his shoulders around. He didn’t make the play, but almost made the play, which would have probably closed out the game right there.

Then on fourth down, again they got in a real heavy set. We ran motion and nobody ran with the motion. So, we had two guys that they didn’t run with, so they completely busted defensively, but our two receivers ran into each other because the one receiver got (into a) collision real hard coming off the line of scrimmage. There’s actually one defender over the top three guys on that play right there, and we just didn’t get it converted. That was the biggest play of the game.

But obviously, like everybody says in games like that, there’s lots of big plays because every play was important. It was a tough way for us to lose on the road, a “week zero” game, a conference game. So, it was a tough loss for us but the more I watch it, like I said before, the more I see the kind of team that we are and the kind of team that we’re going to be.

I think we’re going to be a more mature team when we hit the road next time. I think our team grew from that.

It’s funny, I have had plenty of seasons like that where you see your team play and you’re like, we might not have won, but I think our team got better, and it was a real good road test for us. That’s where I think we are right now.

Obviously, we’ve got to clean up the things I talked about that caused us to lose that game and get better at those things.

An overview of Incarnate Word:

Incarnate Word is an interesting study for us. We just got the depth chart here at noon today, and they pretty much don’t have very many guys back from last year’s team. It’s pretty much a new coaching staff and a whole new team. It’s a very transfer-oriented team, whether it be junior college, but mostly four-year transfer players on their team. Last year, they had a tremendous, tremendous football team. I mean, a team that would have finished in the upper level of Conference USA, a team that went deep, deep into the playoffs and was a really, really good football team. This year they got a lot of really talented players on their team. They’ve got a quarterback that’s a Texas A&M transfer who had success at Texas A&M. They’ve got running backs that have had success at other four-year schools. They’ve got plenty of talent across the board at every position and will be a team, just because it’s their first game and they’ve got a bunch of new players playing together, it makes it a little bit tougher preparation for our coaching staff and for us to prepare for the game. We know they’re loaded with a bunch of D-1 talent and got a DI talented football team. The preparation for them will be one that we have to go back and study a lot of film of them at other places. We have an app now where we can go back and punch a player’s name and watch every play that that player has taken in his college career. That’s nice to have right now with the new transfer portal that we’re dealing with. So, we’ll do a lot of personnel study on them that way. Schematically, we’ll study all the things that the coaches have done with the previous schools that they’ve been at. So, I can’t really answer a whole lot talking about Incarnate Word, but I know they’re a very talented team.

On he would have run the ball on 3-1 or 4-1 late in the game at Jax State if he could go back:

There are two schools of thought there. It was a calculated decision, but it didn’t work. The calculation was with the time getting to where it was getting to, I thought we needed to move and get some yardage as quickly as we could. I felt like that was our chance to get big play. Just to explain everybody, what goes on in a coach’s mind is if we get that first down now, they’re going to go back into their umbrella type of look. So, I was playing to win. I wasn’t playing to tie, you know what I mean? I wanted to go win that game and that’s aggressiveness. If I was playing for the tie, I would have ran the ball, you know what I mean? But I was playing to win, and I felt our best way to win it right off the get go, instead of having to go into overtime, was to try to get them condensed down to stop the run game on third and fourth in shorts. That was my thoughts there. So, I’ve thought it over. It didn’t work, but I wouldn’t do it any other way if I had another chance.

On how Gavin Hardison has improved and how he can grow from the first game:

I think where he’s matured is he made some decisions in the game (at Jax State) to throw the ball away when he was on the run. Where maybe in previous (situations), just as he continues to grow as a quarterback, he would try to force those throws on the run a little bit. This one (the first interception), obviously he knows that that’s what we’ve got to continue to improve in. You can’t just try to thread it in that needle. That’s the thing he’s got to be very careful of because he’s got such great arm strength, but you can’t throw it in too tight of a window right there. So, on 2-11 in a really close-fought ball game he has got to make better decisions in that type of situation for sure. So, we will keep working with that. We’ve already looked at that in the film. There wasn’t much of a window there to put football into right there. He’s just got to be better.