Middle Tennessee football came into Saturday with an opportunity to send its seniors off on a high note. However, the New Mexico State Aggies entered Floyd Stadium and dominated the Blue Raiders 36-21.
After that loss, Coach Derek Mason met with the media and answered questions. Here’s everything that he said.
MASON’S OPENING STATEMENT
“This was not the outcome the Blue Raiders wanted today. Penalties, turnovers, critical mistakes in situations, and we weren’t very good on third down defensively; those things take you back. I told our guys that I wasn’t surprised we were able to run the football. We had a good game plan and week leading into the game, and we even tackled better, but today was about busts.”
“For us, it was more miscommunication and busts that let guys run free because we don’t communicate. We work on these things in practice, but as a young defensive unit, communication isn’t a one-person job, and bad things typically happen when you don’t do that. Today, I saw just enough bad things happening where we couldn’t shrink the margins, and unfortunately, this game withered away from us as we got into the fourth quarter.”
MASON ON THE TWO KEY INTERCEPTIONS
“We’ve got to take care of the ball. I’m not sure if it slipped, but the ball was high, which led it to be tipped, and those things never lead to anything good. You can’t turn the ball over, but we missed our opportunities to get it, and they put it on the ground. You must populate to the football to get the football right. A couple bounced back to them, and we gave up points; that’s something that we look at, but this was a winnable game.”
“We had a good plan and a week of preparation, but the execution and lack of communication made it rough.”
MASON ON NMSU USING TWO QUARTERBACKS
“It wasn’t more or less what they did, it was what we did. We saw these same looks in practice and understood they would have to throw it if we got them behind the chains and stifled their run game. You want a team like this to play left-handed, and they did that but hit shots right and left on busted, wide-open plays that never should have happened. Everybody’s got to take accountability in this, but it starts with the coaches, including myself.”
“We saw these things; we practiced these things, so that’s the disheartening piece of how this thing goes down on a Senior Day.”
MASON ON ANTHONY BYNUM AND BRANDON BUCKNER’S PLAY ON THE D-LINE
“They get the chance to do what every little kid in America who plays football wants to do, that’s come off the edge and go right towards the football and make tackles. They work hard on their keys, ball to, ball away, and sometimes it can look easy, but it’s hard when you face a quarterback who can run. The keys and eye protection- those two have gotten better all year, so kudos to the way they played. I thought they played hard.”
MASON ON THE PHYSICALITY OF MTSU ON OFFENSE
“The personality to be able to come off the ball, it starts there. Over the last week and a half, we had three practices, and they were very physical; we lined up in two back and ran downhill. We wanted to change the temperament of what happens up front because football is a line-of-scrimmage game. If you can flip that switch and you get your offensive line to play that way, it helps your defensive line because iron sharpens iron; it’s physical. I thought some of that showed up today.”
MASON ON PLAY-ACTION CAUSING MISCOMMUNICATION BETWEEN MTSU DEFENDERS
“Eye candy, the idea is eye candy, so there was a lot of motion, but sometimes when you the push the coverage, we lock it. But you must pre-communicate, which was an issue all day. When you asked the guys, they said, ‘We just didn’t communicate,’ which becomes somewhat unacceptable. That’s why you saw a couple of guys switch out; we had to talk about what they saw.”
“For us, big plays are generally given up when you have bad communication or guys have bad alignments, and today, we saw that come out. There were seven big plays, but those can give away 21-28 points, so that’s seven too many.”
MASON ON THE SENIORS AND THEIR IMPACT THIS YEAR
“These seniors had to go through a lot. A new coach who’s in their tail almost every day is hard to gravitate towards the new, but I think these guys have worked hard to lay foundational pieces that I think will lead this team forward. I want to thank them for the young men that they’ve been and how hard they worked. People judge what we do by the outcomes, and I get that, but when you’re growing, it’s a journey with peaks and valleys.”
“What you try to get them to do is enjoy the journey. We’ve got one more game; these guys have one more chance to enjoy this journey.”
