Below is the transcript to the Bobby Wilder Press Conference.
Good afternoon everybody. Good afternoon to all our 12th Monarchs out there in Monarch Nation. Coming off a 31-17 win Saturday night at home versus Albany. Puts our record at 1-0. Compliments to Albany, they’re a good football team. They played smart. They played physical. I can understand why they were a preseason top 25 team. They play in a good conference, and we wish them the best of luck the reminder of the year.
Besides getting the win, which was critical Saturday night, we had 56 players play in the game. Seventeen players played for the first time, a lot of redshirt freshmen. Jordan Hoy who was a transfer, played for the first time. Nick Rice kicked well, he was the only true freshman that saw time in this game. Generally, what happens when you get that first game experience, it helps you going from week one to week two, where usually you make the most progress as a team. Hopefully we’ll see that progress this week in practice with 17 guys playing for the first time.
Rarely do you lose the turnover battle by two, and still win the game. Statistically that’s not supposed to happen so I feel fortunate that we were able to win by a couple touchdowns. We played smart in this game. We only had three penalties for 30 yards, that’s a good sing. Losing the turnover battle, and then being as disciplines as we were with penalties really helped us.
Offensively, we only ran 57 plays this game. We were 4-of-12 on third down. We need more plays, we need to get more conversions. Special teams were outstanding in this game. All of our units met all of our goals. We punted the ball well, we kicked the ball well. Our coverage units were very good. We were mistake free with substitutions; no penalties on special teams which is really big, we had an explosive return on our punt return unit for 31 yards that led to a touchdown when we were up 7-3 early in the second quarter.
Defensively, the first half was outstanding. Albany ran 29 plays for 69 total yards. That is as good as it can get. The second half was not as good, they ran 43 plays for 206 yards, and scored both of their touchdowns. That really came down to third down stops, we didn’t do as well in the second half. On 31 pass attempts we had seven sacks which was outstanding. We constantly had pressure on the quarterback. We had nine tackles for loss whether it be in the pass game or the run game for minus 46 yards. That’s winning football. That’s what we need to build on defensively. We feel like our strength on defense is the front. Applying pressure which helps your coverage, and also in the run game.
Every head coach in the country will tell you this after week one, and that is we need tackle better. We had some situations where we did not tackle well in this game, they got yards after contact. We will work hard on that in practice this week.
Offensively overall it was a poor performance for us. The good news is we are capable of playing much better. We practiced better than we played, and we expect to play better this week. We had three turnovers, and it could have been more. We take a lot of pride in ball security, it’s something we work on constantly. You can’t blame the weather because the weather was the same for both teams. We got to throw and catch it better, make good decisions with the ball, and then protect it better when we’re running. We definitely need to be better in the run game. That was not a good performance for us from assignment and technique. We had many situations where one person didn’t handle their assignment. Offensively to have success when you run the ball, you got to black well in the o-line, you got to hit the holes as a running back, and then on the perimeter at wide out you got to block better than we did Saturday night. That will be an area that we will look to grow in.
The great news offensively is the completion percentage was 69 percent for a first-time starter Blake LaRussa, and first time playing at Old Dominion for Jordan Hoy. For those guys to complete 69 percent of their passes on a really difficult night to throw with the wind and the rain combination. That was something that I was very pleased with. If we hit the third play of the game, if Jonathan Duhart catches the ball like he normally does, now you add another 75 yards to the total, and you’re up around 250 yards in the pass game. We’ve got to get better at converting those situations.
Speaking to this week’s opponent Masachussetts, they’re 0-2 with two tough losses. They were up two touchdowns and ended up losing late in that game two weeks ago. They lost to a good Coastal Carolina team this past weekend. Like I said to our team they could easily be 2-0 with a couple breaks in the game. They have a good staff. Mark Whipple their head coach calls their offense has won a National Championship in college, he won a Super Bowl championship with the Steelers as Ben Roethlisberger’s coach. They’ll be a well-coached team.
Offensively they average 32 points a game. Their quarterback Andrew Ford is playing at a really high level right now. He’s thrown for 65 percent completion and 300 yards a game. They got an NFL caliber tight end in Adam Breneman,who’s averaging 150 yards receiving through two games which for a tight end is exceptional. Andy Isabella is another really good receiver. Out of their 295 yards passing those two guys account for 222 of those yards.
Defensively, they’re solid, they play hard, they’re physical. They’ve had some explosive plays against them so far this year that has cost them some points in games. It’s a tough place to play playing. Going to Amherst I’ve got a lot of experience there either playing or coaching there. It’s a stadium similar to ours where everybody’s right on top of you. Beautiful location right on campus, so we’ll be excited to go to work. We’ll exercise ball security and tackling this week which are two areas where we need to improve.
Q: The defensive line was pretty disruptive what did you see from some of the younger guys in there and the play of the defensive line and linebackers?
A: Yeah, we had some solid production from those guys. Jordan Young for his first game played really well. Everything we thought he was capable of, athletic, he can run, he can tackle, he was really good assignment wise. Demetrius Stitmon played, Lawrence Garner played, Zach Lackman played, and those guys played fairly well for their first game. There’s a lot going on out there, so overall at linebacker core we played solid football. We can definitely improve in that area, but we’ve got some really good players, some athletic guys. It helps when you have that much disruption from the defensive line. We played nine guys in the defensive line, and they all played well. I was really pleased with Juwan Ross playing inside in his first college game. He was disruptive, he had tackles for losses, he was taking on double teams. Brandon Tyson, to have Brandon back who missed all of last year, Brandon played really well. What you’d expect from Rotimi, and Ximines, and Ward and Appouh, Miles Fox, those guys accounted for six and a half of the seven sacks. They were just dominate in this game. We had probably three or four other situations where they had near sacks. The quarterback just got the ball out at the last second. Those guys were really good, and that allowed for the linebackers to grow and develop which we’ve talked about all preseason. We’re going to need that; those guys are going to have to help so we can get those guys grown.
Q: You talked about not running a lot of offensive plays, there were some explosive scores, you didn’t run the ball as well as you’d like. Is it tough to get a rhythm when you’re not out there putting together any plays?
A: It is, when your first play is negative four yards, and then you get the dropped touchdown pass. You’re three and out the next drive. The second play we missed the blitz. LaRussa got hit on the interception which wasn’t his fault. Then we had the two-play drive on the touchdown to Duhart which was just a fabulous catch. Not being able to get in a rhythm, and a lot of it was self-inflected from the standpoint of either mistakes, missed assignments, and turnovers. When you turn the ball over three times, you’re losing on average a half dozen plays. There’s another 18 plays right there, and now you’re up to 75 which is where we would like to be. We would like to run 75 to 80 plays in a game, and that’s even more credit to our defense for the way they played not getting the amount of plays from the offense. Those guys were on the field a long time in this game, and the best benefit of being able to sub like we can now. We can play eights guys in secondary which we did. We can play nine guys in the front which we did, and that is going to help us throughout the year.