Tuesday afternoon, Coach Neal Brown held his weekly pregame press conference to review the JMU game,preview the upcoming Missouri game, and answer some questions from the beat writers in attendance.
As per the standard tradition, Coach Brown talked up this week’s opponent and was able to clarify some things they need to work on and what was good from Saturday’s game.
Here are some highlights in bullet form:
- Happy with the win but many mistakes to fix and teach from
- Was proud of how the players dealt with adversity
- Second half effort was much better
- Extremely happy with ST, but need better placement on KO and more hang-time on Punt
- We need to be better stopping the run
- Physicality was missing on offense, across the board, not just the line
- Defense had good pressure on QB
- Defense had very few explosive plays allowed
- Only real positive on Offense was 0 turnovers’s
- The Run game was bad and had several poorly timed penalties
- Passing game was OK, but had 5 or 6 drops
- obviously didn’t play their best, expect a different team Saturday
- Odom’s teams have always responded well to adversity, expects no different this year
- They have a good offensive unit, usually highly ranked, production starts with Kelly Bryant
- Has a lot of offensive experience
- Has explosive Special Team returners
- Not as much to worry about as first overall game
- Most of the Staff has played at Mizzou, so there’s a familiarity/comfort level
- Can’t simulate road game atmosphere, but overall it’s not much different than home game other than plane ride
On preparing for a “Cornered Team”
- We prepare the same, we didn’t play well, we need to be hungry
- Missou in midst of 5 game home stand
- Wyoming hit 2 explosive runs from QB, multiple TEs, not good comparison to us
- Staff tinkered with game plans in summer for the first 4 games
On what was good and bad from Saturday’s game
- Against JMU, we seemed like more worried about missing assignments than being physical
- Sills did nice job communicating but needs better pad level
- We were purposely vanilla, played cautious
- Perimeter blocking was struggling in game after being good in camp
- Technique needs to improve
- The best part of Saturday was the team won
- Played everyone we wanted to
- Procedure penalties were of varied causes, nothing repeated to be concerned over
- Staff was in culture building mode this summer
- They were choosy about who was brought in post grad transfers, looking more for good kids, trustworthy
- When they are comfortable culture is where it needs to be, will evaluate transfers more on talent
- Character evaluation is about asking the right questions
On only wearing T-shirts during pregame
- The practice started in Troy due to water weight loss due to heat
- Kept doing it because the kids felt fresher
- The option was presented to the Leadership Council and they decided to do it too
That’s it for this week.