Neal Brown Press Conference - South Alabama Pregame

Neal Brown Press Conference – Oct. 15, 2018

Opening Statement
First, I want to say thoughts and prayers for everyone in Panama City, Mexico Beach, Port St. Joe and really all the surrounding areas, and thanks to all the responders that are down there.

Saturday was a bad loss for us and I don't think that you can put it any other way. Hats off to Coach (Turner) Gill and Liberty. He had his team ready, they played better than we did and that is why they won. We played bad football on Saturday afternoon. I thought the team was emotionally ready to go. It was not one of those deals where you're flat and you're playing a non-league game. I wish you could chalk it up to that, but it wasn't that.

We just didn't play well. First and foremost, that's on me and as the head coach. It is my job to make sure we play better. It's also on our staff, we just didn't do a good enough job. It's one thing when you go and have a bunch of lack of effort but that wasn't it. Our kids played hard, we just didn't play very well. I think that has got to be taken by myself and the staff first and foremost.

Offensively, our staff, led by me, just didn't do a good enough job to put the team in position to make plays. A lot of Troy beating Troy. That is the last thing I tell the guys when we leave the locker room every week. We had four sacks, eight penalties, two turnovers and our perimeter blocking was the worst I have ever been around. Our pass protection was not good enough when we did throw the ball and then our passing game; if we want to be successful the rest of the season we have to be able to execute in the passing game which we didn't. That goes for throwing, route running, protecting, really just a total breakdown in all phases.

Positives we did run the ball reasonably well versus a nine-man box and we hit a couple of explosive plays. Defensively I thought our stats were good, we limited the run, but we just had several critical errors that cost us.

We gave up three long scoring drives, two drives of 75 yards and a drive of 89 yards that won the game. We allowed them to go 89 yards in four minutes and our Achilles' heel all year has been third and long conversions. We have to figure out ways to pressure the quarterback and we are not doing a good job of that right now. We have to put our guys in better position to pressure the quarterback and we have to make plays. We have to understand in the secondary how to cover in those situations and we have to put the players in a better position coverage wise also. I think we didn't handle tempo well and this is on staff and players. Low sense of urgency and we have to do a better job of that because people are going to exploit that as we move throughout our schedule.

Special teams I thought was the lone bright spot. Our punt teams continue to do a really nice job in limiting returns. The one big negative was the fumble punt return by (Cedarius) Rookard. We put Marcus (Jones) in the game and I thought he did a good job of fielding those balls and he had a good punt return. Jabir (Daughtry) Frye did a good job on kickoff returns and I thought (Tyler) Sumpter field goals were huge. Very disappointed in our performance. Not up to standard from a coaching or a playing standpoint. The encouraging thing is I really don't have a question on how we are going to respond and that's from a coaching or a playing perspective. We are about the right things, we have had adversity in the past and we responded in the right way. We are going to fight and get it back working. We have been working on fixing it the last two days and we will present that plan to the players this afternoon. I have great faith in our players and staff that we will respond in the right way and the good thing for us was that it was a non-conference game. That doesn't mean that it was not important, it was important, but all of our goals are still intact.

Thoughts on Quarterback Sawyer Smith…
I thought from a managing the game standpoint, I thought he did fine. He's has to be better throwing the football. He was a lot better in practice, he's been better at throwing the football than what he was in every game in his entire career. He did a great job of getting ball out on the perimeter in some of the run-pass combinations we have, and we just blocked them terrible. They were only getting one to two yards on the receiver screen when they should have been four to six yards plays, so I don't think he got much help in that regard. I think he lost faith and quit throwing (those plays) and everything kept getting suppressed in the run game, so we were not able to hit those explosive plays. When you look at bad offensive performances, I think that the quarterback always gets too much blame.

Red zone performance…
I think the number one issue was lack of patience on my part. We went for the jugular probably and if we got to do it over again I probably would've just grinded it out because we had more success grinding it out. Second thing is we had penalties that moved us back. We had two different times we had third-and-short and we took two different penalties. I'll take it on me from a play calling standpoint, but we can't get costly penalties especially when we are struggling and that's what happened on two different occasions.

Confidence level after the loss…
I feel confident in how we are going to respond. I think we are going to come out and compete. We get into South Alabama prep tomorrow, but our guys like to play football and they compete. I have the same level of confidence (from Boise game) this time around it's just a different meaning behind it.

South Alabama coming at the perfect time?
I'm glad we are getting back in our conference play. This is a rivalry game, I've made the mistake in the past of making this game bigger than some of the others, but I won't repeat that. We will treat this like a normal week. South is coming off a big win over Alabama State. They are coming off a really tough early season schedule. They had an extremely tough road schedule where they had to face three quality opponents on the road. I know they have some confidence built off of last week's win. We will get team that's well prepared, they are tough and well coached just because I know who they have on that staff. We are going to have to play considerably better than we did on Saturday to have a chance to win the football game on Tuesday night.

Troy University Athletics

Neal Brown Press Conference - South Alabama Pregame

Players Mentioned

Sawyer Smith

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