Below is the transcript from the Bobby Wilder Press Conference.
Hey, good afternoon everybody, coming off a difficult loss at home to Florida Atlantic. Our biggest issue right now as a football team is the injury situation that we’re trying to work through. We’ve got 10 players that will be out for this game at Florida International, 12 others that I’m hopeful, with a good week of treatments and a lighter practice schedule, that we can get back, and six guys that are clearly playing hurt. We’ve got 28 guys injured right now, which is the most we’ve ever had. They’re battling, they want to play, they’re trying to work through it as best they can and it’s just one of those things where, as a head coach, you’ve got to make a decision first and foremost on their health and their well-being, and then the best interest of the football program moving forward.
The biggest play of this game, the Florida Atlantic game, was the punt return that got called back, our defense forced a three-and-out on the opening drive. We had a block in the back on the play, which was the correct call, and off that sequence we start on our own eight-yard line, our offense goes three-and-out, we get a 28-yard punt and Florida Atlantic scores on a short field. We had a 14-point swing in a sequence of about four plays, that really hurt us.
Special teams, we just had poor execution in this game, I just mentioned the penalty. Bailey really struggled punting the ball in this game, which was the first time he had in a football game. He punted for a 31.9 average. I mentioned the punt return that got called back, and then we had a couple of poor decisions on kickoff return. With the new fair catch rule, you really have to do a good job on those high kicks that you catch, either down around the goal line or going backwards fair catching it, because you can get the ball on the 25-yard line and twice we didn’t do that, which hurt us in field position.
Defensively, 27 of their 41 points were drives that started on our side of the field, either a combination of turnovers, poor punting that really put us in a bad place on defense, as Coach Blackwell said even when you start on the plus side, the job of the defense is to get a turnover or force a field goal, and we did that twice in this game, but just not enough to hold down a good offense. I thought we had a really solid performance from Jordan Young in this game, he had ten tackles. Derek Wilder had his best game of the year, he had five tackles, a sack, two TFLs, played really hard. Then Ford-Dement and Brocchini both had interceptions in this football game. But overall, we have to, when we can, play a lot better than we did on defense. Right now on our defense, a lot of our players are just pressing too much, they’re trying to do too much and we’re mis-fitting some gaps, we’re not being exactly where we need to be in coverage, so we need to get back to the way we played, especially the first six weeks.
Offensively, far too inconsistent in this game. We had 13 possessions and seven drives in this game with at least one first down, four of them were in FAU territory and they either got a turnover or a sack, or something that pulls us back. Thirteen of our offensive players right now are either out or nursing injuries, we’ve got a lot of guys that are battling injuries and we’ve got to get them back healthy and really focus this week on executing better, particularly in the run game, we’ve got to get things going some more in the run game.
This week’s opponent, FIU is 4-4, they’re 4-1 at home. They’ve played really good football at home this year. One of the major challenges will be the early start time and the heat, the forecast is 86 degrees at kick time, it’s going to be hot and humid, so we’ll do a really good job of prepping for that. This week, offensively, they’re really balanced, they average about 400 yards split up evenly between run and pass. James Morgan, the quarterback, is playing good football, 10 touchdowns, only two interceptions. They’re really running back and receiver by committee, they spread the ball out evenly amongst the tight ends, receivers, and running backs. Defensively, they’re an aggressive, fast, physical unit. Their two linebackers remind me a lot of our two guys, Garner and Young. Gates and Lewis have combined for 96 tackles, Sage Lewis was the preseason defensive player of the year, he’s a good football player, and they’ve got tremendous speed down on the field. This’ll be a major challenge for us, heading down to Miami, but one that we’re excited about, we’ll have a great week, we’ll get some guys healed up, and we’ll do anything it takes to win the football game. I’ll gladly take questions.
Q: Lawrence Garner left the game, came back, is it something he can play with going forward? It looks like it was a hand injury.
BW: Yeah, he injured his hand. Initially we feared he may have broken his hand. Which is why he came back with what looked like a club on his hand. We’re going to look at it again today, they wanted to let the swelling go down yesterday and today. Hopefully, we get some good news on that one because he’s been playing really good football.