Week 2 Press Conference
Head coach Rick Stockstill held his weekly press conference on Labor Day at MTSU’s Hall of Fame. Coach Stockstill discussed the win over Alabama A&M and the Blue Raiders’ opponent in week two of the season, Vanderbilt.
Stockstill started the morning off by addressing the media before opening the floor for questions.
“It means a lot to me that you guys would come. I’m pleased with how we played last week, did a lot of good things, did enough things in that game that you can not do against a better opponent. We’ve got to get some things corrected and we’ll do that and we started that yesterday. I was really proud of how we competed, how hard we played and how efficiently we played offensively in the first half and well we played defensively the whole game. We’ve got Vandy this week, they’ve got a couple of extra days having played last Thursday night. A tough, hard nosed, physical football game is what we’re anticipating. They’ve [Vandy] got really good players, their offensive line is really big and they’ve got two really good backs. They settled in on their quarterback and i think they’re a lot better at that position then they were last year and that’s no disrespect to the guys they had last year. They’re well coached. With that I’ll open it up to questions.”
Stock Answers the Media
Q. Do you think the outcome of the Vandy game could set the tone for your season this year?
A. It didn’t last year, its not going to this year. We don’t put our eggs in one basket, we’ve got to beat to Vandy, we don’t beat Vandy we cant forfeit, well I guess we could forfeit the rest of the season, but still have to play them. It’s irrelevant, you play one game, you got Vandy this week and we haven’t even played a conference game yet, so no it won’t determine anything. We’re just trying to be the best team we can be this week and our focus is on Vanderbilt, nest week we’ll be focused on Bowling Green. This game doesn’t have anything to do with games three through twelve.
Q. Where you aware to start the game Brent completed his first 22 passes?
A. There was a point where i said we’ve completed a bunch of balls here in a row, but i didn’t know the number, i just knew it was a lot. We were pitching and catching pretty good, your not sitting over there counting anything like that, but it was pretty incredible. To complete 22 balls in a row, there are a lot of pieces to the puzzle that have to work together for that to happen. Brent was accurate, our receivers ran good routes, made good catches and our offensive line gave him [Brent] time to make the reads and accurate throws. To put up 500 yards and 45 points in the first half and complete as many as we did in the first half was pretty remarkable. To me your practice habits carry over to your games and those guys were really good this past week in our pass scale, throwing, catching, routes on air, the different drills and did well and it lead over to the game.
