Villanova head coach Mark Ferrante…
On whether his message to the team is about there being plenty of time left in the season: That is the message. There is a lot of season to go. Regardless of what your conference record is at this point in time. Everyone has still got to play the other guys. So again we try to approach it as 'let's go 1-0 this week and that is everyone's mindset to take things one at a time.' Unfortunately right now in the league we are coming up short on the short end of the stick but it's about our execution. We have to execute better for the four quarters in each game. You know it's a game of inches. You know in the last two games we just had a two-point conversion tipped by their 6'4" safety against Stony Brook, which caused the game to go their way. And then a 52-yard field goal to Maine's credit put it through the uprights like we just talked about. So hey, sometimes it comes down to the last play or the last drive of the game. You see that frequently in football, look at all the last second field goals that won games yesterday for the pro teams on Sunday, there were quite a few of them. So you got to play and you've got to play well. So unfortunately right now our execution isn't where it needs to be. I heard one of the other coaches earlier say third down is a big critical down, everyone calls it the money down. Unfortunately in these close losses that we've had we haven't gotten off the field enough consistently as a defense. We've allowed our opponents to convert too many third downs and on offense we haven't converted enough of our own to keep our drives alive and that is what you have to do to win these close ones at the end."
On Villanova's special teams: Yeah well our most consistent player is fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you want to look at it is our freshman punter who did a great job punting the ball this past week and these past couple of weeks. And he is also our kickoff guy and I don't know if he has the most touchbacks from a kickoff perspective in our league but I know he had two more this past week and three the week before. So he is doing a great job as far as we are kicking the ball away. Unfortunately we got to do a better job with our return game. We are not doing a great job on kickoff return and then our placement kicks on field goals and extra points. We missed a field goal to end the first half which would have obviously given us three points. Where Maine made the field goal at the end of the second half and gave them the win. So we need to improve there. And JMU always has dynamic returners so our kickoff coverage team and our punt coverage teams need to be on point as well. We've been doing pretty good there but we are going to have to contain some pretty good returners this week for sure.
