Below is the transcript for the Bobby Wilder press conference.
Coming off an extremely disappointing homecoming loss against a good Middle Tennessee team. This is a game that should’ve been much closer than the score was. The reason this score was not close was because we allowed two pick 6s on offense that led to 14 points, we allowed three explosives TDS with missed tackles on defense that were 20 points and then we had a missed block on a punt where our punter got tackled on our own 23 that led to another seven points. So 41 of the 51 points were areas we could perform a lot better at than we did in this game. Starting with special teams, overall it was a good performance against a very good special teams unit. Middle Tennessee does a very good job with their special teams. We won the drive start, which is the exchange of field position through special teams but we had that one major mistake on punt that really hurt us.
Defensively, difficult to overcome, the field position, the points we allowed. We did not play well on defense, we allowed those three explosive touchdowns, we had 12 missed tackles in the game for 147 yards, a couple of big ones on some long plays. This should have been a much better performance in this game defensively.
Offensively we had 70 plays for 520 yards. I felt like we moved the ball consistently during the game. 243 of those yards came in the first half so the yards were balanced. The problem was the five turnovers, which is very uncharacteristic of our offense and we were 2 for 7 in the red zone. So we had an opportunity seven times, if we scored seven touchdowns that’s 49 points, we only scored 10 points.
This week we go into a bye. We’ve had 13 straight weeks of football with four weeks of camp and nine weeks of the regular season. This will be a good week for us to get some guys back healthy that we need to get back. We anticipate going into the North Texas game we’ll get Lawrence Garner our leading tackler back, two of our tackles we’ll get back Juwan Ross and Brandon Tyson, one of our safety’s Kane Miskel who also missed the game and then our special teams running back Brandon Sinclair. So I’m hopeful we’ll have those five guys back for North Texas game as well as get a lot of our guys that are playing a lot of football some time to get better.
Q: One of the guys you did not mention was Jeremy Cox will he be back?
A: Jeremy Cox , my mistake, yes. He re-injured himself last Wednesday. He was close on Saturday, he just couldn’t get enough strength on it pushing off. We don’t have practice until Friday so he’ll just work on his rehab. We do count on getting him back for this game and we could really use him. Kesean is physically pretty beat up. Although he had another good football game, 17 carries, 108 yards but we need what Jeremy can bring also.
Q: Are there younger guys you’d like to start getting in the mix now?
A: Yeah, we played 11 freshman to this point and we’ll continue to look at that opportunity. We’re very mindful of the four game limit because there’s guys we had a plan with starting with the first game of the season, to get them in four games if we could. That will be the focal point for the remaining three games, the freshmen number one that can help us win. The number one goal is to win football games right now but also whether there is an opportunity based on whether it’s an injury or performance and whether we can get them in the game.