The Falcons football team will finish off their non-conference schedule against the Middle Tennessee Blue Raiders on the road on Saturday night.
Middle Tennessee has also had a difficult start to the season, going 1-2 coming into their matchup against the Falcons; however, the Falcons feel that it will not stop their aggressive approach on defense.
“They’re going to bring pressure, and they’re going to try to lock up man to man,” Falcons head coach Mike Jinks said. “What we’ve got to do is learn from the South Dakota game and maybe do some things different from our splits, make sure we don’t get run throughs and keep the run game simple because as the game is going on, we may be able to lean on him a little bit.”
While the team is coming off of a 49-7 loss to the Northwestern Wildcats last Saturday, the team feels that they were able to get a better understanding on what they have to work on the most before going into playing Mid-American Conference opponents.
“I’m okay with the yardage,” Jinks said. “I really don’t look at the yardage that we give up, you don’t want it to be that high of a number, obviously, but it’s the explosive plays that we gave up on two back to back series in the second quarter in which the game got out of hand, I’d rather see us play coverage there, attack the ball underneath… they move the ball down the field, keep playing and then you get a stop.”
The team was also able to take a positive sign from that they were able to create more turnovers against Northwestern.
“We won the turnover battle,” Jinks said. “At the end of the day, it’s going to pay dividends for us come conference play. So keep playing hard and in the second half, we made those adjustments, we made them keep everything underneath and they drove, but we created turnovers. You’ll be amazed at how those things seem to happen.”
However, the team knows that they must play well against Middle Tennessee in order to get the most momentum going into the MAC play.
“We’ve got to get ready to go,” Jinks said. “We need a positive performance. One of the things you can see and what usually happens when you have these dropped passes and things of that nature, especially from an offensive standpoint, is that it’s a confidence killer. They’ve got to believe in the precedent, so we need them to relax and we need them to play football.”
