MOBILE, Ala. – With the first open week approaching this weekend, University of South Alabama football head coach Joey Jones sat down with the media Monday to recap Saturday’s contest at Kent State.

A few highlights from Monday’s press conference are below.

Head coach Joey Jones
Opening statement:
 “First of all, I don’t think we were really ready to play like we normally are, and that’s my fault.  We have got to make sure that our players are 100 percent ready to go, we’ve always had that in the past.  It wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t a deal where they were not ready to play, it just wasn’t that focus that we normally have where we are 100 percent locked in.  Again, I’ll take the blame for that.  We didn’t play well early in the game and put ourselves in a hole, we made several mistakes as we all know.  Critical mistakes, we can’t have that and win.  It’s pretty simple to say.
 “What I was proud of was that we came in at halftime and said we had to correct some things, we’ve got some issues, but we have to go out and run these base plays.  Let’s just do what we do, and once something good happens we’ll be fine.  We needed a good play, something to get our momentum going, and it did – from that point forward we played extremely good.
 “My concern is from kickoff until that play happened, did we have enough leadership to stop the bleeding so to speak without having to have a play on the field happen?  Something needs to happen with the leadership on the sideline, which is one thing we looked at.
 “On the flip side, I was real proud of the fact they came back and really fought.  A lot of teams could have folded at that point, but they came back and made a game of it – we had the ball on the 20-something yard line with a chance to tie it at the end of the game.  The last time I remember being in a game like that was when we played Penn State, we were down 34-7 and came back and almost won the game; it was a real similar situation.
 “They proved they could play, but obviously you have to play both halves and 60 minutes – all those coaching clichés you’ve got to have – to win big games.  In some ways I’m glad this happened; you never want to lose a ballgame, but sometimes you learn a lot of lessons when you’re held to the fire.  I think our team was held to the fire the last two weeks.  Did we play some good football?  Yeah, we played some good football.  Did we learn some lessons about ourselves?  Yes, we probably learned some lessons about ourselves as well.  Sometimes you don’t really analyze yourself until something bad happens; you tend to overlook little things. That’s some of the things we’ve looked at this week.
 “I had a long meeting with our staff, we talked about what we thought we could do to improve from A to Z, we’ve got some things we know we can do to improve our football team.  I talked to some of the seniors, had a meeting with them, and it was the same thing; I got some feedback from them, and they had a couple of little ideas that were good.  It was a good dialogue.
 “I think you dig deep when things like this happen, I think our kids will respond.”

On how the first four games will affect the rest of the season:
 “I know a lot of people looked at our schedule and predicted 8-2 because of the two D-I [Football Bowl Subdivision] teams that we were going to play.  That doesn’t really matter to me, but looking back over the last four games I think that we played both [FBS] teams tough.  We’ve got some things to work on, but I think that it has renewed us a little bit.
 “I think we’re going to grow up much more than had we beat a weaker team 45-0.  How it affects us the rest of the year I don’t know, but the bottom line is I know that there is definitely a fire in their eyes right now that I hadn’t seen this year.  Some times when you’re hungry you tend to want to eat more, and when you’re not hungry you’re fat; you don’t really care about things as much, you don’t really analyze things.  I think it has us hungry again.”

On how the team is approaching the remaining six games:
 “They realize we’ve played some pretty good football.  We’ve made some critical mistakes in those games, but if we don’t come out ready to play like we did against Kent – not taking any credit away from them; they came out ready to play, we didn’t – we will get beat.  I think our kids realize that.
 “And we always need to focus on what we do and not what the other team does.  I think we focused on the other team the last couple of weeks rather than just on us and what we need to do, sometimes that comes from an experience team that understands that.  I think our kids will understand that better now that we have had some negative experiences with that, and take that into the last six games in a positive way.”

On how big having this week off is:
 “It couldn’t have come at a better time.  I don’t care who you are when you go on the road twice and fly while they are home to play; things may have been different had we played N.C. State or Kent State at home.  It makes a difference, that’s why people want to have games at their place.  We’ve just got to respond.”

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