HONOLULU – University of Hawai`i Warrior football head coach Greg McMackin conducted his weekly press conference Monday, recapping the team's win over Charleston Southern and looking ahead to this week's Western Athletic Conference opener against Louisiana Tech.
On the Charleston Southern game….
We went into this game—it didn't matter who we were playing—we had to fix things on our football team and we talked about it a lot and worked on it very hard and that's what was so good about this game. You know you're in between the lines, underneath the lights, it gives you a chance to work on (things).
On the defense's performance…
The thing I'm so proud of is they played consistent the entire game. Let me just say this, I give (defensive coordinator) Dave Aranda and his staff complete credit. I'm so proud of, number one, the players, but I'm so proud of the coaching staff because we had some things we had to get taken care of. This was the kind of game that you could take care of things, you could emphasize things, and then you could do them. Those guys work night and day to get that over to the players.
On the offense's performance…
Rolo (offensive coordinator Nick Rolovich) did a great job offensively. He called a great game. During the week you make up a game plan, but the coordinators are the guys that call the plays during the game, and I thought he did a great job. We played six quarterbacks, everybody got into the game. It was a good team game. We were able to help ourselves as a football team and now we come up this week going into league. It was a good game to get us into league and now its time to see if we really learned our lessons.
On the defense developing good habits and creating turnovers ….
Absolutely, those things come in bunches. (The defense) starts getting an attitude. Really for the last year...we haven't been playing defense the way we want to play defense, an attacking style of defense. We blitzed fast and tight and we were gang tackling. We were running them to the ball. We were aggressive and we were making plays. We've been doing it in practice, and about half of the games, but consistently we need to be doing that. That's what we hopefully learned this past week.
On the student support…
Our team and whole program really appreciated the support of the students and that's something that really helped our football game, because after the game we went to the band and to the students that were still there. That was a big deal.
On moving from FCS to FBS competition this week…
They (Charleston Southern) had a few Division I players, but we have a better football team… there's no reason we can't play that way each week. Now, the bigger and faster and stronger a team is, that comes into it. But that's how we should play, like we played this last weekend.
On this week's opponent, Louisiana Tech….
I know the head coach Sonny Dikes real well. We coached together at Texas Tech. They are going to be aggressive on defense. They're going to throw it on offense, but they do have some running backs. They have probably the best returns in the league for the last couple of years. They've lost their last three games, but they've been close and against good football teams. So we're going to prepare to play our best.
-UH-
