Oct. 2, 2007
Head Coach Rocky Long
(On where his team is at the mid point of the season):
“I think we are a team that has potential, that has shown signs of improvement weekly. Even in the BYU game, other than the turnovers, we actually played better against a quality opponent that we have before on defense. We moved the ball pretty well on offense if we don’t shoot ourselves in the foot. It’s a team that has sufficient talent to win games and we’re getting better as the season goes on.”
(On what the team works on during a bye week):
“Number one, we’re just working against ourselves to [stay adjusted to] the speed of the game. Number two, we’re obviously working on holding on to the ball better, catching the ball better, getting some of our fundamental skills back to where they were. I think our players were very emotional (in the BYU game) so the concentration level wasn’t there.”
“If you want to look at stats – and about midway through the season I do – there’s some you can rationalize about. Our defensive stats aren’t that good against the pass, but we’ve had seventy more passes thrown against us than Wyoming has and Wyoming has the number one pass defense. Our statistics on punt return and kickoff return are really poor so we’re going to spend extra time working on that this week.”
(On how his defense played against BYU):
“I thought considering who the opponent was, our defense had its very best game against BYU. That’s an explosive football team we played that normally with those turnovers would have scored sixty, and we kept them out of the end zone several times. We made them punt ten times and I don’t know when the last time was a BYU team punted ten times. I thought considering the opponent the defense couldn’t have played any better then it did on Saturday.”
(On how whether the team is meeting his expectations thusfar):
“I think they are living up to my expectations on the maturity level. The way they handled beating Arizona, then playing Sacramento State, and the way they got themselves ready to play against BYU. Our team was very disappointed (after the loss to BYU) and in a bye week it’s really hard to make your team practice, but they were good this morning. They were flying around. We went ones against ones and twos against twos, and it looks full speed to me. Normally you have to beat it out of them. You have to kick them out of the locker room and make them go up there and practice. We practice at six in the morning and there wasn’t one guy late, there wasn’t one guy we had to yell and scream at. We made some mistakes because we make mistakes every day in practice, but it wasn’t an effort problem. That’s a mature football team. That’s a team that still wants to win some games.”