Below is the transcript from today's Bobby Wilder press conference.
Good afternoon everybody. Good afternoon to all our 12th Monarchs out there in Monarch Nation. Coming off a frustrating loss at Marshall this past Saturday. Right now it’s simply about execution for all of us; coaches and players. We’ve got to find a way to execute better than we are at this point. Marshall is an outstanding football team. They rarely lose at home, it was their homecoming. They’ve got a top-10 defense in the country, but certainly a team that we were playing well with for long stretches of this game. We’ve just got to find a way to get more explosive, particularly offensively.
I felt like we were ready to play in the first half of this game, we ran 37 plays to Marshall’s 24 plays. We had more yards than Marshall did, but the telltale of this one was the fact we were inside the 10 twice early in this game and only came away with a field goal. You need to score points when you’re down there, particularly against a team that’s as hard to move the ball against as Marshall is. Down 7-3 at the half, down 14-3 entering the fourth quarter, it was our inability particularly in the third quarter to get anything going on offense. We didn’t have any first downs in that third quarter, putting too much pressure on our defense.
Special teams wise, Bailey Cate continues to perform at a high level, 41 yard average on four punts, but we hurt ourselves on kickoff returns. We fumbled the ball and they returned it for a touchdown and we muffed a punt that was well blocked that we could have had an explosive return.
Defensively, I felt we were very good in the first three quarters especially. We only allowed 130 yards at the half, one touchdown. Then in the second half we got beat on an out in up, we got beat on a seam ball, we got beat on a fade. They hurt us in the pass game in the second half in some critical areas. A lot of it had to do with executing what we needed to do technique wise, but also we were on the field far too much in the second half.
Offensively right now it’s about finding a way to finish drives and create explosive plays. We only had five plays in this game over 10 yards out of 63 plays and we got to get better in that area. That’s something that we started to work on last night in practice and we will continue to work on throughout the week.
This week’s opponent, WKU, another good football team. They’re the defending league champs, they’re 4-2 right now, 2-1 in the league. Offensively they’ve got one of the better if not the best quarterbacks in the league in Mike White, they’re throwing for about 300 yards a game. Defensively, another solid unit only allowing 18 points a game. They’re well coached, they’re physical. They’ve only had two away games to this point, they’ve had four games at home. On the road they’ve lost to Illinois and they had a really close game at UTEP a couple weeks ago. We know we’ve got a lot of work to do, were excited to do it. Our players are focused, they want to win, they want to improve and coming home, playing at home, playing on Friday night, a blackout on national television we’ll be excited to play in this game.
Q: You’ve done this before, a scheduled Friday night game. What challenges come with a short week and how you’ve had to adjust your schedule?
A: The only real challenge is just it’s just one less day of preparation so you got to cram a little more into it, but we did something yesterday we’ve never done. We put pads on and went out and practiced, partly because losing a day, but it’s the other part about the bad taste everybody’s got in their mouth right now. I equated it to the players it’s like going through a slump in baseball where you’re just not hitting and the best way to get out of a slump is you’ve got to practice. You got to get in the batting cage, you got to get on the field against live pitching, you got to do it at a high level. So we addressed the two biggest areas right now where we’re not having success in. Number one is our inability to throw and catch and get explosive plays, well that’s all we did yesterday was throw and catch the ball and try to push it down field. Defensively we’re not getting the turnovers so we emphasized ripping at the ball, grabbing it, doing drills yesterday in practice that were about turnovers. We went out and went hard yesterday on a day where normally it’s not a hard practice and players wanted that. They wanted to practice at a high level because they want to get out of the slump and we’re going to do the same thing tomorrow morning. We’re going to put full pads on and we’re going to play tackle football. I feel like we’re the healthiest we’ve been all year so we can do that, we can go out and practice aggressively to try to get out of this slump. So we’ll make up for that day that we’re missing with just the intensity of the practices.
Q: With the coaching change at Western, how if at all different can that offense and defense be since a season ago?
A: They look very similar. I think that coach Mike Sanford, it wasn’t a lot different philosophically from coach Jeff Brohm, the previous head coach, but he also recognized they were having success with what they’re doing and that’s something you got to be really careful of. Generally when you’re a head coach taking over a program, you’re not taking over a successful program. Usually you’re going into one that’s in need of repair, well that program wasn’t in need of repair. Especially with the fact that he had a veteran quarterback coming back, who’s a successful player. So they are very similar in style in all three phases.
Q: Ray Lawry played on Saturday, how did you evaluate him and is it still the same process going forward?
A: He played well, we would have gotten both him and Jeremy Cox the ball more, we just didn’t have enough plays in the second half. We ran 37 plays in the first half and they had 23 carries between them, I would have loved another 37 plays and another 23 carries. He played well, he was on his reads, we just didn’t have enough plays in the second half to get him the ball more. I talked to him right after the game, he said coach I was fine, everything felt good and he practiced hard and practiced well yesterday. It’s just about getting him back and getting a lot of work in practice. He hasn’t practiced for six weeks leading into last week, but he’s healthy and ready to go.