“To start off, we’re very excited to get another opportunity to play this wonderful sport on this Saturday. We’re really excited about having a two o’clock game rather than a 7 p.m. game. Our kids are geared more towards earlier in the day. It’s not an excuse for what happened last weekend.
“It’s going to be exciting. Our kids are fired up. Just got done sitting in with the offense, and I think the game plan is excellent. We’re really looking forward to it. Can’t wait to get the bad taste of losing out of our mouth. That’s the hard thing about college football and pro football is you have to wait a week to be able to go out and get it out. Whereas baseball plays everyday, and basketball usually plays two, three times a week, we have to wait a whole week to get that bad taste out.
“We have a little bit of an edge to us this week, a little chip on our shoulder. We’re really looking forward to going out there and trying to correct all wrongs.”
Q: Which area will Georgia State show the greatest improvement from week one to week two?
A: “Special Teams and running the football . . . we looked at our personal that was on [special] teams. We’re tweaking some things personal wise as far as the special teams goes.”
Q: Assess the physicality of the defense.
A: “I thought they were very physical. That’s going to be our trademark . . . we will be physical and move the front, try to get penetration, and blitz. I thought they did a good job on the very first game and hopefully we improve upon it.
Q: How to imporove Ronnie Bell’s decision making?
A: “More reps. Just experience. Ronnie’s a bright young man. He makes some really good throws . . . he threw the ball 51 times for 391 yards and two touchdowns. . . if you can take four maybe five [throws] out of there, it would have been a super performance. We’re not down on Ronnie at all. Just more experience, knowing when to pull [the ball] down and take off, [and] knowing when to go ahead and make the throw. The one interception for a touchdown: that wasn’t a bad decision. He made a good decision . . . Albert Wilson was wide open and he just threw it over his head and that happens. We’ll fix those.”
Q: How prepared is the defense against Chattanooga quarterback Jacob Huesman?
A: “We’ll find out Saturday. They’re working hard for it. They’ll be prepared for as much as they can be until they come out and surprise us with something. They’ve done a good job studying the film. They know he’s the coach’s son, that he can run, and he’s their leading rusher. So we’ll have a plan for that.”
Q: What worked well for the offense?
A: ” Our shallow-cross drive concept was good, and I think they all were good. I don’t really remember anything being shut down when we just find the right guy. . . our concepts were good [and] they’ll continue to be good. We’ll sprinkle in a few more than we did in the first game.”
Q: Assess the offense’s performance from the first game.
A: “There were too many drops. We expect to catch everything. I’m not gonna single out any individuals, but there’s a couple guys that wish they had a couple of them back. Positive: I thought as a whole performed really well . . . I thought Albert [Wilson] did well, Kelton [Hill] made some good catches early. Blocking wise we still want to be physical. When we say we want to be physical on the run game, that’s not just [offensive] line. That’s receivers, tight ends, that’s everybody . . . we’ll have a few different schemes for this game that’s been in our playbook that we haven’t used yet. We’ll also use receiver screens and bubble screens as part of the run game . . . we’ll add more of those in to help take some pressure off.”
Q: More spread formations to create running lanes?
A: If you watch us and go break down the film, we’re a multiple [offense]. We’re two back, two tight-ends, and we’re one tight-end and two backs . . .we’ll be multiple and spread you out and still get big with you. . . That’s our whole makeup: different personnel groups, different formations, and pretty much same concepts. We’re gonna kind of do it all. Whatever it takes.
Q: How to handle Chattanooga?
A: We will attack whatever we feel is their weakness on the defense . . . That’s what we did all day Sunday and all day yesterday, all day today and all day tomorrow was figure out what the weaknesses are to attack and that’s how we’ll game plan.”
Q: Will Ronnie Bell running every be a part of the gameplan?
A: We’ll see. Obviously, any time there’s a break down and they get on the move, quarterbacks have to make decisions: whether to run or to throw. There are some times when we would like him to make a decision to go ahead and take off and get down. There are sometimes, as you saw, one where [Bell] scrambled and was able to find Albert and got a big gain. Those are split second decisions that he’ll get more and more experience at doing. We’re never going to be a team that asks our quarterback to run all the time. But, we will utilize our quarterback whatever way we need to put us in a position to get first down and move the ball.”
Q: Thoughts on such few penalties?
A: If you tell me we’re gonna get five penalties a game, I’ll take that any day. That would put us really high in the nation in penalties a game. There was something funny about that game: there was no holding calls on either side of the ball. Usually you can count on a holding call on either side, you can count on a special teams penalty, you can count on either an interference or something, and then there’s always one trump card somewhere. There’s usually about four or five if you’re a discipline football team. . . The ones you don’t like are the illegal procedure [or] offsides on a kickoff. I’ll live with pass interference because our kids are being aggressive. That’s going to happen any time the team is throwing the football . . . I’ll take five [penalties] a game, but two of those we can get rid of and that’d be down to three, and that would be perfect.
