OPENING STATEMENT:

“I thought our guys gave great effort throughout the game against USF. We played extremely hard and really competitive throughout the game. We gave ourselves an opportunity in the 4^th quarter to be able to try to win the game. We came up a little bit short, but we did some things in that game that we weren’t doing before. Now we just need to work to continue to get better. I thought we had an excellent week of practice before that game. We need to carry that over to this week to make sure we continue to get better and improve on a week-to-week basis with UMass coming in here this weekend.”

IS IT IMPORTANT TO HAVE REGIONAL MATCH-UPS IN COLLEGE FOOTBALL, PARTICULARLY WITH THE WAY THE AAC IS SET-UP?:

“UConn and UMass have played before when they were in the Yankee Conference. In this day and age of travel, it helps for football up here in this part of the country.”

YOU ARE IN YOUR SECOND TENURE AT UCONN, MARK WHIPPLE IS IN HIS 2^ND TENURE AT UMASS, CAN YOU REFLECT ON THE CHALLENEGES THAT BOTH OF YOU HAVE IN TRYING TO REBUILD YOUR PROGRAM’S?:

“I can’t speak on Mark’s behalf, his situation is probably a little bit different than mine. I think it’s well documented when I was here previously, we were part of the Big East, which was in the BCS at that time. Now we are no longer part of what they call the Power-5 conferences, so that has changed. We are no longer in a league with BC, Syracuse and the teams that are here in the northeast, which makes it a little more difficult. We are in a fantastic conference now in the American, the competition is outstanding. We are just trying to get better each week, continue to improve our roster every way we can each and every year. It’s one of those processes that doesn’t happen overnight, you need to be patient, you just want to see your guys improve week-to-week, which I think we are. That’s what we need to continue to do and get them bigger, stronger and faster over the winter. It’s not one of those projects that you can turn the ship as quickly as maybe some people would like it to be turned, but we are moving in the right direction and we are going to continue to keep doing that and get better.”

WHAT’S THE CHALLENGE YOU SEE GOING AGAINST UMASS ON SATURDAY?:

“They are a good football team. Mark is an outstanding coach. They have good players and do a lot of different things defensively. Offensively, they are more than capable of putting points on the board, if you take a look at what they’ve done against the people they’ve played. For us, we need to know who they are, but we need to make sure that we continue to get better and do the things that we can do to give ourselves and opportunity to win.”

MATT SCHONVISKY / SITE CREATOR