Opening statement:
Unfortunate loss tonight. Anytime you have an opportunity to close the door on somebody in this league, you gotta be able to do it. Most of our games, if not all of them, are going to come down to the fourth quarter. Right now, we have not been good enough as a team to figure out how to close the door and seal victories in the fourth quarter. Penalties hurt us tonight - way too many penalties. Don’t exactly know what was going on on some of those. We’ll go back and look at the film, we’ll turn in what we need to turn in, but not a real clean football game on our part on both sides at some times. At the end of the day, we gotta figure out how to close games in the fourth quarter. That’s what we have not done this year as a football team.
His take on what happened with Baron Hopson’s penalty:
Have no idea. Have no clue. Absolutely no clue what was going on. The play was absolutely over with, then a flag comes out of nowhere, so I have no idea.
On Luke Duska subbing in at right tackle before going down with injury:
[Nikola Milovac] was cramping. Mili was cramping at that time.
How the Owls planned to contain JSU WR Deondre Johnson:
We had a plan, we were going to try to press him up and try to be physical with him. I thought we were. I thought we did some things good at some times. He’s a really good player, and good players are going to make plays. We had our moments where we were able to bat the ball down and make some plays and he came up with some big plays down the stretch like good players do.
On Brayden Munroe’s performance (7 catches, 159 yards):
We always knew Brayden was a really good football player. We moved him a little more into the slot this week because this of Zion Booker’s situation. He came up big for us, made a lot of plays in the middle of the field. Big target, strong guy who can catch the rock. We gotta make sure we continue to get more people involved as well, but all in all, I thought Brayden played extremely hard and extremely well.
Regarding halftime adjustments from JSU’s defense:
I actually thought the numbers —when you look at the statistics, it was pretty much even. We had 200 in the first half, pretty much a little over 200 in the second half, for the most part because of a couple play. We ended up getting an explosive play to Brayden in both halves. I thought [JSU] did a good job bringing a little bit of pressure, playing more a little more man coverage in the second half. At the end of the day, we still found a way to move the ball down the chains. We gotta score touchdowns as opposed to trying to kick field goals.
How Mack evaluates the play in the trenches:
I really thought the guys were straining a ton on both sides of the ball - o-line and d-line. I thought those guys were giving some really good effort, trying to make sure they controlled Jacksonville State’s defensive line. From an offensive line standpoint, we had injuries and had some illegal procedures and things like that. We gotta get more disciplined as far as pre-snap. Defensive line, I thought they did a really good job of really getting penetration up the field. They controlled the rush, especially with the running backs and quarterback, We kinda bottled that up pretty good tonight. We just couldn’t stop them when they got ready to throw the ball vertically down the field.
