OPENING STATEMENT: “I thought our preseason has been really good. We’ve come out of it healthy. I like the way that our young men have approached practice and gone about their business. Here we are a couple of days from the opener. We are ready to get started.”

HANDLING THE OFF FIELD DISTRACTIONS: “It’s really been easy to tell you the truth. Any time you are in a leadership role and especially when you are leading young men who have the ability, or there are things on the outside to cause distractions or make them be distracted, you just present to them that the only focus and attention that we are concerned about is what we have in front of us here in 2019. That is the approach that I’ve taken with them, it’s the approach that they’ve taken. You try to teach them life lessons because to me, that is what college football is all about. Of course you want to win, but you’re trying to develop these young men for what is going to happen to them for the next twenty, thirty or forty years of their lives. There’s always going to be things that you can’t control and these are things that we can’t control. What we can control is to put our best foot forward and do everything we can to prepare, work and go out the best we can for the twelve opportunities that we have for the 2019 season. It’s easy for me to put the blinders on and do what I have to do, but now it’s up to me to make sure I get our players to do the same thing. I really feel that that is what they are doing. You don’t want to do anything that is going to short-change these kids, especially the eight seniors that we have on our team to take away what they would like to accomplish here at UConn and our football program.”

WITH THE MOVE TO INDEPENDENCE, HAS THAT HAD A POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE EFFECT ON RECRUITING?: “Everything that we’ve seen so far, from a recruiting standpoint has all been positive. We have a game plan in terms of what we are going to do with recruiting and how we are going to communicate that plan to the prospective student athletes who we feel will fit into what we want to get done here. All in all, everything has been positive with everything that you here on the outside.”

THOUGHTS ON ANDREW LUCK’S RETIREMENT: “I think it’s great that he was able to do what he felt was best for himself and where he saw he wanted to go with his future. Anybody that can do that and walk away from some of the things that were in front of him, I just have a tremendous amount of respect for people that make those decisions. You’re going to have to have people that criticize everything in this world, but nobody knows what goes on inside a person and what they see their life to be moving along. There is only one person that can make those decisions and that’s the person themselves. That’s what he wanted to do. You watch him express himself and speak, you can tell that he put a lot of thought into that, was heartfelt. I respect the man tremendously.”