WKU Hilltoppers College Football Pregame Quote, 09/02/2019

Really looking forward to this coming week, our first Conference USA game against FIU. It’s going to be a great challenge for us. It’s a good football team, but they took a tough loss last week to Tulane so I’m sure they’ll be fired up just like us. We got a chance to practice yesterday and the kids were looking good. Everybody’s working hard and had a great look in their eye, so I’m looking forward to this opener against FIU.

On how the team has responded after Thursday’s loss to UCA:

They’ve been great, the kids have been good. You know, they respond how our coaches respond and we’ve been really positive. We talked the day after the game and I said, ‘Hey, it’s OK to be down and depressed today, but we’ll watch the film and get the corrections made and we move on. The sun comes up.’ I think we’ve had a great, positive demeanor, our guys are very positive, they worked extremely hard yesterday. I said it in my press conference after the game: I expect nothing less than what they’ve done. The guys are in good spirits and excited to go.

On the offensive and defensive lines winning the battle in the trenches:

They dominated the line of scrimmage. From an offensive standpoint, run game, pass protection ‚Äì we had all the pass protection we needed all game. I thought the D-line got after it in the run game, there were a lot of TFL’s out there. But that’s not the whole game. The name of the game is stopping the explosive plays, and then you offensively creating explosive plays. And when you do, you have to score touchdowns; that was the disappointing part for me. We have to find the end zone if we’re going to get that first conference win, and that will be the next step for us against FIU. And it will be a good test because they’re a good defensive team.

On Gaej Walker’s 152-yard, two touchdown debut at running back:

He had played some running back in high school. Later in the spring I wanted to take a look at him and we handed the ball to him two or three times and I could see he could cut well and he had some explosion and big-play ability and those kinds of things. We felt like where he was defensively on the depth chart, we weren’t going to have our 11 best guys on the field and that’s what we always want to do. When we made that move, we felt like he could get in there and have a role as a running back and he took advantage of the opportunity.

On DeAngelo Malone’s 3.5-tackle for loss, 1.5-sack performance:

I saw it from Day 1 to be honest with you, it’s pretty obvious to see he’s a really good football player. He went out there and did what he was supposed to do; he was all over the field, sideline-to-sideline, played with a lot of passion and enthusiasm. That was great to see, we’re going to need it throughout the season and he’ll need to have another big performance this week.