Below is the transcript for the Bobby Wilder press conference.
For The Old Dominion football team this is an exciting time of year in college football made even more exciting by our first press conference every year. We honor our heroes in the military we have several of them here with us today, hopefully getting ready to eat in the back but each game, each home game, what we do is we honor one of our wounded warriors; we have them come out, they go with the captains for the opening coin toss and it’s our way to say thank you and show how much we care about our military particularly all of those that have allowed us to continue to do what we love to do. Please join me in a round of applause for our special guests.
Pre-season camp the football gods were smiling down on us all this year 20 consecutive days of 100-degree weather with the heat index they made it as challenging as they could for us and over the course of those 20 days you really have to find out how much you love playing.
Very happy as a head coach about our improvement in all three phases special teams especially coming off of last year and the bad taste we had in our mouth missing out on a bowl game. We still have at this point tremendous competition for playing time/for spots on the travel team at this point there are about a dozen freshman that are fighting to get on the bus, that are fighting for the opportunity to play with the new rule this year that the freshman can play in up to four games that has allowed us as a coaching staff to spend more time with them in camp and getting them a lot more work in camp. In the past you’re so fearful about a freshman even playing one play that you would burn his redshirt that you have a tendency not to play them as much or spend as much time in camp well this group is not only talented but they’re hungry and they’re excited to play from August 5 when they heard the rule the explanation all these kids want to play so we have tremendous competition going on with that right now.
Starting with our special teams unit I feel like the one area we definitely improved is our ability to put the foot into the ball and what I mean by that is our ability to kick off extra points, field goals and punts. For anybody that was there Saturday night for our final scrimmage we took a little bit of time where we just had the long snapper, the holder and the kickers out there. We had a competition and at one point both Nick Rice our starting kicker and Brad Davis, our back up, both hit 55 yard field goals and they hit them back to back within the competition so leg strength has improved there. Nick will kick, he’ll start out kicking for us extra points and field goals, Brad will handle kick offs but their leg strength has clearly improved as well as our punter Bailey Cate. Bailey has had a very good camp punting the football so feel much better about that situation and just over all with special teams the players attentiveness to it they want to do well and then the depth as I mentioned and I’ll mention a lot this year the ability now with the freshman to help and add value to our depth is a good thing.
Defensively we’ve challenged the front this year to set the tone of our defense and the way Ximines, Appouh, Toal and Fox played in this camp I feel very confident that that message has been delivered amongst the defense we have good depth in the defensive line I feel like we could play eight to 10 players but those four clearly set the tone and when I talk about setting the tone, every defense in America wants to pressure the quarterback they want to make the quarterback uncomfortable and our goal this year has been set by them as that’s what we need to do, we need to be a defense and a defensive front that affects change with how the offensive coordinator calls the game how he feels about protection that he may need to keep a tight end in with a tackle in on one side and have a running back with a tackle on the other side to block our D ends and that takes away from their pass game we want them to feel like they have to do extra things and different things to protect the quarterback because were going to be relentless in getting to the quarterback this year that’s our goal. We plan on being more diverse; defensively a mix between our zone and man pressures and how we play coverage this year with veteran safeties having the ability to confuse the quarterback with the coverage looks so those are all goals that we will work on starting this week.
Offensive we emphasize the importance of the football and taking care of the football and that’s something I feel really good about coming out of camp our starting quarterback Steven Williams had an outstanding camp. His touchdown to interception ratio was as good as you could hope for particularly from a quarterback who just went through his first camp as a guy who was working to solidify the starting position he did that going into week one and then all our guys who touched the ball their ability to protect the ball whether it was a wide out catching a ball or a running back running with it quarterbacks running with it we did a very good job in this camp with emphasizing the importance of this year its either about scoring points or if were not scoring points were punting the football and were playing good field position football. We also worked to developed multiple personnel groupings which will be critical this year we want to make it more difficult to defend us we want to make it harder on the opposing defensive coordinator when they’ve got to look and try to match our personnel and we can run different groupings out on the field we can get more players that deserve to be on the field on the field and help ourselves offensively so I feel very good about that developing with the offense and that’s still developing.
Looking at this weeks opponent Liberty, this is a team that was 6-5 last year they’re in a position that were familiar with that transition position where last year was similar to 2013 for us you know you can’t go to the FCS playoffs, you can’t go to a bowl game now they’re in year two of that transition period which is very difficult it’s hard to go through that it’s hard on your coaching staff in terms of how do you motivate your players for what they could do it’s hard on the players for what they’re looking at you got to find ways each week to motivate your guys and the one thing that clearly motivates us about this football team is how they started last year, this team opened the season last year at Baylor and beat a Power Five team on the road that certainly got all of our attention us and the players we talked about that early in camp and all the way through one of the biggest challenges about playing this football team will be going on the road in the atmosphere that they’ll provide were certainly excited about that but when you go on the road you’re going into hostile environment you’ve got to have yourself mentally prepared for that offensively they have an outstanding quarterback Stephen Calvert is one of the top quarterbacks in the nation in terms of returning statistically almost 3,400 yards passing even more impressive is the 29-6 touchdown to interception ratio, which means he does an outstanding job protecting the football they’ve got a lot of weapons on offense they’ve added defensively they’ve added a lot of new players to their roster defensively they’ll try to confuse their opponent with a lot of movement they’ll try to out number you in the box they’ll play man coverage so all things that can be challenging if you’re not ready to handle it for us were excited to get the season going were excited to get on the road and play in a in a great atmosphere and really looking forward to what will be an outstanding an exciting season and I will gladly take questions at this point.
Q: Bobby, where do you see the big picture with Liberty, kind of a series rivalry developing hopefully two state schools, FBS schools that share common ground?
A: Sure, Yeah, its all all of it is based on college football and Conference USA we have eight league games, we get four non league and were scheduled out for awhile with Virginia Tech we’re scheduled out with UVA and coming up with East Carolina, Wake Forest so we would like to continue to have that non league philosophy of playing regional teams. I can certainly see us continuing with Liberty beyond what we already have and we want to continue to play as many of the regional teams as we can and that certainly Liberty will be in that category.
Q: Steven can run as well as throw, how careful are you telling him to be though given you know how important he has shown himself to be this fall to the offense are you telling him anything different in regards to running at all?
A: Hash, number, sideline. It’s what do you need to do for your football team to win, you know it’s a situation where we need to get a first down a situation where I get all I can get and slide but that hash, number, sideline will be telling us, hey if I’m running the ball I’ll get to the hash if I can, get to the numbers keep going if I can get through the numbers to the sideline get as much as I can get, get out of bounds but its being smart doing what you need to do to win the game but also doing what you need to do to stay healthy and that’s anybody at the QB position and whoever we put in the game.
Q: Coach what’s been the biggest surprise so far in pre season camp
A: Weather, The weather, the biggest surprise has been the ability of the freshmen to comprehend what we were doing to learn and then to make an impact the fact I mentioned earlier there are 12 freshman right now and very strong consideration to be on that bus ride other than when we started the program playing with all freshman this is the biggest number we’ve ever had of freshman that could potentially be impactful on this football team so it speaks to not only the talent level, you’ve got to be talented enough to get yourself in the mix but the determination, the drive of those kids and the ability of the coaches to prepare them to even be in consideration to get on the bus, so that was a very pleasant surprise of camp.