What are some of the challenges and rewards of being the new offensive coordinator?
There are certainly some challenges to being both the offensive line coach and the offensive coordinator. It's not just five guys that you're responsible for now; it's the entire offense. But it's a role I'm familiar with. I have experience as an offensive coordinator. It's been good to learn and see the growth from the time I was a Troy until now. You have to have an open mindset and be willing to learn and grow each day. I couldn't do it without the help of the coaches next to me. They work their tails off. They coach, develop and that's what we want to do as coaches. We want to coach football and develop football players and young men. We want to pour into their lives, as Coach Patterson says. There are certainly challenges such as time management but the familiarity with the role has helped, certainly.
What would you say are the biggest strengths of the team and some of the areas you need to shore up?
You know it's interesting. Sometimes your strengths are your biggest weakness. Sometimes your weaknesses can become your strengths as long as you know them and you know how to handle them. I think that for us, since January, I've challenged our players to focus on their development, to focus on becoming a better football player. They know that I'm going to say it every day, probably, but "it's players, not plays." It doesn't matter what plays we run. That's the best part of my job here: we get to coach great players and great young men that we enjoy being around, that are going be around our wives and kids that are going to represent this university well. But I think, you know, we're always striving to get better as a football team, as football players.
And it's been so much fun in Training camp competing against the defense. And there are some great battles out there every play, every day. One day the offense gets better of the defense and some days the defense is the best of the offense.
And then, even within practices from period to period. And these young men have embraced the competition and I think they're beginning to realize that when you go out there and you compete with each other to be better every play, the whole team sees and feels the effects of that.
I don't know that there are necessarily strengths or weaknesses or things that we need to shore up. We're really focused on just our next meeting our next practice, the next walk-through, the next play, the next period of practice, the next workout, the next class. We try to focus on that. And we're going to try and control what we can control each day.
How is the offense coming together?
The progress has been good thus far. And the challenge is to continue to stack good day on top of good day. And at the end of the day, we'll look up, and we'll see where it falls.
How do you think the offense stacks up within the UAC?
There are a lot of unknowns, I guess, but we're familiar with some of the teams. But I think for us, and Coach Paterson will say it and I don't want to sound cliche, but we're focusing on ACU almost 100 percent of the time. It goes back to controlling what we can control.
There are some new faces and some old faces back in the fold. Some that we've played before that the fans will see us play again. That's exciting. But we're really just focusing on ACU right now. We've got a long way to go and a short time to get there. And if we'll just continue to keep our heads down and focus on those things, we'll get to where we want to be.
But as far as the rest of the conference and where we stack up, we'll see.
NEXT UP: Coach Badon on the Running Backs
