Below is the transcript from the weekly Bobby Wilder Press Conference.
Good afternoon everybody. Good afternoon to all our 12th Monarchs out there in Monarch Nation. Coming off an extremely frustrating loss at home to Western Kentucky. On behalf of myself and the team, a big thank you to all our 12th Monarchs for an outstanding showing at this game. Tremendous energy from the crowd, something we really needed and appreciated. As disappointed and frustrated as we are with this game, as I explained to the team after the game and reiterated again yesterday, in a lot of ways football is a microcosm of life. You go through a lot of things that really test your character and we’re going through a stretch right now that is definitely testing our character, but as I told our guys this adversity we’re going through defines who you are. You need to be able to handle adversity because ultimately adversity is what defines your character. It’s really easy to do well when things are going well for you and your having success on the football field, but similar to life whether its something personal, something with your family, for our players, something with school, you find out a lot about your character and the makeup of who you are as a person with how you deal with and handle adversity.
They responded to it, they responded well yesterday. We went out and had a hard physical practice and tried to work on the areas specifically that we need to improve on and that’s what we’re going to do. In these types of situations particularly when you’re part of a team, the number one thing you need to do is you need to unite, you need to trust each other, you need to stick with your beliefs systems, your values, who you are as a person and who you are as a team. I was really proud of the way they responded yesterday, obviously they are very disappointed right now.
They know that they should be performing at a high level, we all know that, but we’re going to stick to who we are and continue to work to improve in those areas. The positives from the game were the fact we ran the ball for 268 yards offensively, we held Western Kentucky to 73 yards rushing. That’s a goal each week to try and be able to win that area, the run game where you can control field position, you can control tempo, you can control the time on the clock and that’s something we did very well.
We sacked their quarterback three times and we didn’t allow a sack, which again speaks to how we’re playing in the offensive and defensive lines. That’s as good of a performance we’ve had by our offensive line, to have that number of rushing yards and to not allow a sack in 25 pass attempts. Steven Williams had his best game from a completion standpoints, he was 68% completion percentage so we’re seeing the improvement with him each week on his reads and where he’s going with the football. Ray Lawry looked like Ray Lawry, 27 carries for 166 yards and three touchdowns.
Then what I felt like was the most dominant quarter of football we’ve played as a program, in the third quarter we outscored Western Kentucky 17-0. We ran 24 plays to their eight plays, we had 169 yards of offense to minus three yards by Western Kentucky. So the point I made to our players is that’s the type of football we’re capable of playing when we’re taking care of the ball or we’re taking the ball away from the opponent. When we’re doing our 1/11 and doing our responsibility we’re capable of playing at that type of level and the frustration is we don’t see that consistently. You’re not going to dominate somebody that much each quarter, but the point I made to them is that what we’re capable of doing and that’s what we need to play like.
The clear areas we have to improve right now as a team is number one turnover margin. We have seven takeaways to this point through seven games and we have 16 turnovers, so were at minus nine right now. We’re down near the bottom of the league and in that scenario last year we were up at the top of the league and up near the top of the country.
Playing defensive back on offense, we’ve got to get better at that. There’s to many times right now where Steven’s thrown a ball and it’s not a perfect throw, it might be behind somebody or it’s under thrown and we’re not breaking the ball up. Now we have to react as an offensive player and go get the football, make sure we do whatever we have to do that that ball ends up on the ground and isn’t caught by the other team, because right now when Steven doesn’t through the ball right where it needs to be, he’s paying for it, we’re paying for it dearly. We drilled that yesterday in practice and we’re going to continue to drill that. That mentality of not allowing interceptions to happen.
We’ve got to have better discipline on defensive versus specialty plays. This is the third straight week where somebody has run a specialty play, a trick play against us and scored a touchdown. We had two in this game, we had a double pass that they completed to their tight end down deep in our territory, fortunately we got a stop on that. We got the tip ball interception by Joe Joe Headen and then the game winner they ran a slant and go for the game winning touchdown on a play that if our corner stays disciplined in his area, Bunmi Rotimi had beaten the tackle and was coming around for a blind side sack. The thing you got to understand about specialty plays is those are object receiver routes, there’s one guy that they’re throwing it to. It’s not a read where the quarterback can scan the field, they’re taking a risk and saying we’re just going to go after this one player on the defense and we’re just going to throw it to this guy. We had a couple situations in this game where we stayed disciplined, incomplete pass and we lost discipline in two critical areas. We worked on that yesterday in practice, we’re going to continue to work on that every day.
We’re going to get extra work with Steven and Ray on the handoffs, we had a missed exchange on a fourth and one that we had blocked up when we were driving late to win the game. Ray missed the handoff, so we’ve got to spend extra time on that fundamental thing that we need to do well. That’s inexcusable to fumble a ball off of an exchange. Occasionally you’re going to have somebody rip the ball out, that’s going to happen, that’s part of football, but when you miss an exchange and it costs you an opportunity to score a game-winning touchdown, we have to fix that.
Those are the areas that we’re going to focus on getting better at in practice, taking better care of the ball, breaking up an interception if its going to happen, better discipline against specialty plays and then fundamentals of the handoffs were all critical things that hurt us in this game.
This week we play a very good North Texas team. They’re 3-0 at home, they’re 3-1 in the conference leading the West right now. They’ve got the leading quarterback in the league, Mason Fine, who’s throwing for nearly 300 yards a game. Very explosive on offense, nearly 500 yards, 36 points. They’re giving up a lot of points and yards on defense so we’re going to have to take advantage of that and the most important thing is I told our team, we have to stay focused on the process of winning. We’ve got to put what’s behind us behind us and really lock in on what we need to do and plan, prepare so we can go out and execute and play winning football this week with the goal of going 1-0 at North Texas. I reminded our guys there’s still a lot of football left to play, there’s a lot of opportunities to get wins and that needs to be the mindset around here.
Q: Bobby, you mentioned last week you met with the leaders of the team as you do each week, I’m assuming you did that again, what is the message coming from them?
A: Number one thing is they’re frustrated. They’re frustrated right now with the result that’s happening. We talked about those areas that I just mentioned that we have to improve. We’ve finally gotten probably as healthy as we’re going to be and we had a very physical practice last week, they want that. Again we had a physical practice yesterday on Sunday, which traditionally is a day where we’re just trying to recover. We had an extra day to recover on Saturday, but they wanted more a physical practice, they wanted competitive drills. That ball drill I mentioned where you got to go up and fight for the ball, we did that yesterday with all of our skill players. It was just a one on one jump ball in basketball; go up and get it, the ball gets on the ground you got to fight for it like a fumble, they wanted to do that. They want competitive live drills like goal line where it’s just a toughness drill. They want to do those things because they want to play their way out of this right now how they feel, so they want to be physical and they want to go hard in practice and that’s what we’re going to do. It’s inspiring as a coach when you get that from your players, when they look and say hey we have to practice our way to wins so let’s keep being physical, let’s keep going hard in practice and that’s what the leadership of this team wants to do.
Q: You had I think a season high in penalties Friday night, I know you mentioned Denzel Williams play as one you don’t particularly agree with; looking at the film, anything stand out about patterns or anything that was going wrong consistently?
A: No, there were a couple of bang bang ones, the one that was called on Denzel Williams which I thought was a really good play. That was a tough one because that would have been a third and eight coming up on the next play. We had some neutral zone infractions, which is just being more disciplined on the defensive line. That’s not a norm for us, either cadence or being aligned in the neutral zone. Normally we’re around five penalties a game at the most, we had nine in this game so we got to clean up the neutral zone plays that we had. We had a couple misalignments at the end of the game offensively. All things that can be corrected. The physical plays, I didn’t discipline the players for that other than just to point out you got to be smart on those bang bang plays. For example, a play like Denzel Williams getting a personal foul, you got to try to run through the receiver, he’s trying to catch the ball. That thing happened bang bang, I still don’t understand that one. Isaac Weaver had one when he was blocking down field after a play that was close. Some of them are judgement by the officials, but the only ones that I have issues with are the dead ball infractions, the neutral zone infractions and the misalignments. Those are the ones that are unacceptable that we need to fix. The physical ones that happen that are judgments by the official, those you got to live with and just coach them.
Q: New opponent North Texas, what’s your biggest concern about them?
A: How well they play at home, they’re playing really well at home. They’ve had a couple of close games at home, they beat UAB 46-43, they beat UTSA on a last minute drive 29-26 so they’re playing good football at home. Their quarterbacks ability not only to throw but run, he’s a dangerous two way guy. They’ve got one of the best running backs in the league, one of the best kickers in the league. Anytime you go and play somebody on the road that’s always a challenge, when you play somebody that’s undefeated on the road, that makes it even more of a challenge.