Below is the transcript from the Bobby Wilder Press Conference.
Hey, good afternoon everyone, thanks for coming. We’re coming off a disappointing home loss to East Carolina 24-21. As I told the team after the game, we are paying dearly for our mistakes, particularly in the fourth quarter. All four of our games have been decided in the fourth quarter. We’re 1-3 and that’s the most frustrating thing right now. The players are extremely frustrated about that. It’s certainly something that can be fixed because our mistakes are self-inflicted, so we’ve got to work to correct those and we’ll start winning football games once we do. The stats that we had clearly had us winning that game. The first downs, the plays, the third downs, points off turnovers, which makes it even more frustrating because we were pretty dominant in a lot of areas statistically except for on the scoreboard.
There were three game changing plays in this football game that cost us 21 points. The blocked punt, the 72-yard touchdown pass where we went for the ball instead of playing the man, and the Stone fumble on the goal line that was ruled a fumble, I thought it was a touchdown, they ruled it a fumble on that play. Looking at our special teams, a big one was the blocked punt. They ran an overload to our formation, and we needed to bring the formation in. That’s a poor job by us of getting the shield coached up to understand that, so we were short one guy to the side, that will not happen again. We punted the ball well; we kicked the ball well. I was really pleased with Nick Rice who took over the kickoff duties in this game. He did an excellent job of location with his kicks in this football game. Then we blocked another field goal, that’s the second week in a row we blocked a field goal with tremendous effort.
Defensively, they ran 57 plays for 309 yards, they had 130 of those yards on two plays in this game. So overall, you could say this was a really good performance. We were disappointed with the two long passes we allowed. That’s the first time that’s happened this year. The difference on the long pass is the one with Geronda Hall early in the game, he got beat, they threw the ball, he made the tackle on it, and we held them to a field goal. Then the one with Lance, he tried to cut underneath the route instead of playing the man and that allowed them to get the touchdown. We’ll get that corrected and we’ll work on that. We held them to three yards per carry. Our two inside guys were fantastic again. Garner had 10 tackles, Young with six, and one interception, and we also had five pass breakups. We’re doing a good job getting our hands on the ball, we’ve got to finish and make the interception.
Offensively, it really comes down to the three turnovers. That did us in. The two interceptions, the one fumble. In a close football game with the way we’re playing defensively right now, 28 points looks like it’s a winning number, and if we don’t throw the interceptions or fumbles, we easily get to 28 points. The quarterback has got to eliminate his turnovers, and then the offense has really got to rally around him, because you look at how hard he’s playing right now, how tough he’s playing, he carried the ball 22 times, he had 110 yards before the sacks. Then he completed 66% of his passes with three of his top offensive players out for this football game. He’s playing good football, but we’ve just got to eliminate a couple of those turnovers from his game right now. Offensively, we need to shuffle the deck a little bit in the offensive line. Nick Saldiveri will be out two to four weeks with a knee injury. The good news he’ll be back at some point. We’ll be day to day with Eric Kumah right now. I feel like Lala Davis will be back for this game. Hopefully we’ll get at least one of those guys back for this week.
This week’s opponent is Western Kentucky, they’re 2-0 in conference play. They’ve had two really close games, they won at FIU 20-14, they upset UAB last week at WKU 20-13. They’re playing really good football as a team. Offensively, they throw the ball really well, they’ve got explosive receivers, they’re passing for 245 a game. Walker, the running back is a really good player, Pearson, the wideout, is really explosive. Defensively, they’re the number three total defense in C-USA, number three in scoring. The linebacker, Bailey, played big against UAB, had a couple picks. Deangelo Malone, their edge guy, is one of the best pass rushers in the league, he’s got four sacks at this point. This will be a major challenge. The big point I made to our football team is the nonleague is over now, we’re into league play, we get to play at home in our first league game against the team that’s number one in the league, so this is a great place for us to start league play.
Q: Stone is carrying an awful lot of the offense, throwing and passing, how much do you think that contributes to the turnovers? It feels like he’s got to do a whole lot right now for you guys to have a chance.
BW: Yeah, we definitely need to get some better performance around him. I felt like we had better performance around him last week than we did this week. For us, it starts with the run game, our protection becomes so much better when we can run the ball, we ended up in way too many second and third and longs in this game where we became predictable and got a lot of blitz designed to attack protection. The run game will be critical in helping to improve his performance.