WKU Hilltoppers College Football Pregame Quote, 09/30/2019

Traveling on the road this week against a really quality opponent in Old Dominion. It’ll be their first home conference game so I know they’re fired up about it. This Old Dominion team, I think, is a really good ball club to be honest with you. They’ve lost three games to really good, quality opponents – Virginia Tech, Virginia and East Carolina – three games where they had opportunities to go win the game. I feel like they’re a team that is basically like us last week against UAB. They’ll have something at home to prove, they’ll have a chip on their shoulder, they’ll be fired up and we have to go match that intensity.

On what he’s seen from Old Dominion in some of their close games:

I think it’s more that they’ve just played some tough teams. I think they’re playing really good defense ‚Äì they’re the second-best defense in the conference right behind UAB. I think they do a great job defensively, so it’s going to be a really big challenge for our offense. They do a great job of run defense. Everybody’s had a hard time running the ball against them. They load the box and they do a really great job of not giving up the big play. Everybody’s tried to take a shot against them because they load the box, and they have been able to keep people from making the big play. On the flip side, offensively, I think they’re doing all the right things. They’ve got really good players. They’re just playing some really good football teams. They’ve had opportunities to win these games and it just hasn’t worked out for them. So, I think they’ll be ready to go with it being their first conference game. So, we better have an edge about us to go get a good win.

On his strategy against Old Dominion:

You know, we’re still early in the game planning process. We’ll always just try to give our kids the best opportunities to be successful, try to put our linemen on proper angles, all those kinds of things. I feel like the UAB defense and Old Dominion defense are very similar in the sense that they control the line of scrimmage, there’s not a lot of space there to run the ball. But, we’ll force the issue ‚Äì if you’re going to move the ball down the field you’ve got to be able to stick the football up in there and be able to rush the football. We’ll have a good gameplan for that. But, the name of the game will be making the explosive play and finding the end zone. If we can do that, we’ll come away with a win.

On how to make sure the team doesn’t get complacent after a big win over UAB:

I think you just need to constantly coach your players hard. There’s two things that I think a football player needs; he needs to know that he’s loved and that he’s taken care of. If a football player knows that he’s loved and taken care of, he’ll run through a brick wall for you. With that being said, you coach your players hard. You keep sharpening the knife and you make them have an edge. That’s what we’re going to have to do this week. If we’re going to go get a win at Old Dominion we’re going to have to show up to the park mad and angry and have our knives sharp and ready to go to work. When I was here in 2015 and we went to Old Dominion, we were kind of like the UAB team that showed up here; they felt good about themselves ‚Äì as they should have ‚Äì they felt like ‘hey let’s go get a win’ ‚Äì as they should have. But they met a WKU team that was mad and ready to play and had something to prove – we’re about to see that out of Old Dominion and we’ve got to match that intensity. That’s the type of football our team needs to play. They need to have something to prove every week, have an edge about them and feel like ‘hey we’re trying to go show the world that we’re trying to go do something here.’ I hope one day we can feel like what we felt before, where ‘hey we’re about to show up to the park and go wear somebody out.’ But, that’s not the approach we need to take right now.