Dear Citadel Football Association:
First and foremost, our hearts go out with sympathy to the family of Mr. Dave Orr, our Director of Environment and health and safety. Once again, thank you to all those who traveled to Western Carolina to support the Bulldogs. A big thanks as well to all those who donated supplies and money to our supply drive that we took to Cullowhee as disaster relief. We had multiple generous donations from members of the staff, the families of players, and even the players themselves that we are very grateful for.
This past weekend we had 429 total yards of offense, with 274 yards coming from on the ground compared to Western Carolina’s 396 yards of total offense with 102 yards rushing. We had 77 offensive plays to Western’s 74. We also won the time of possession battle with 33 minutes to their 27 minutes. The tape also shows that we lost on 4th down, going 1 of 2 to Western Carolina’s 2 of 3. We lost the redzone scoring battle as well, going 1 of 4 to their 5 for 5. We also failed to cause a turnover but threw 2 interceptions. Although we won in some areas, we were unsuccessful in a few important areas such as red zone scoring and turnovers, and we will have to eliminate the mistakes that caused those stat lines going forward.
We designed a lot of runs for the quarterbacks this week as a part of the gameplan going into Western Carolina to try and mitigate their explosive offense and keeping the time of possession in our favor. The great day on the ground needs to lead to more touchdowns at the end. This week in practice we will be placing even more of an emphasis on finishing in the red zone than we already do, with multiple blocks of practice assigned to red zone work.
I have said in the past that we are building a program, not a season. Because of this, you will start to see more of our younger players get reps as the season progresses. We believe that we can get these young players meaningful snaps that are valuable to their development going forward. The head coach for VMI, Danny Rocco, is someone I have tremendous respect for and someone that is a Hall of Fame football coach. The Keydets have some really good players, led by their running back, Hunter Rice, who was a 2nd team All-Southern Conference selection last season. The coaching staff at VMI does a great job at finding different ways to get the ball in his hands throughout the game as well. Defensively we will need to line up and execute at the point of attack this weekend and offensively we must finish drives, score in the red zone, and limit turnovers. If we do those things, we will be bringing the Silver Shako back to Charleston this weekend.