East Texas A&M University Athletics

Texas A&M University-Commerce Football Coach David Bailiff
Opening Statement: Coach Bill Maskill did a great job with his kids chipping away at us. We made a lot of mistakes tonight that you can’t make, and that’s on me. When you make those kinds of mistakes, you look at the head coach, I have to do a better job to instill some discipline in them. I have to do a better job in my decision making.
 
Our team played their hearts out and there is a lot of good football left on this football team and I anticipate a lot of wins, but, Coach Maskill and his staff deserve a lot of credit tonight cause they just kept chipping away.
 
I don’t know when the last time Antonio Leali’ie’e fumbled a football, hopefully it’s the last time. Like I said, all eyes are on the head coach when you go out like that because I didn’t have them ready to play four quarters.
 
On Offensive Line: The offensive line will gel. Our issues right now is that we’ve had some little nicks and haven’t been able to consistently play the same five hopefully that’s behind us next week. Overall,l they did a pretty good job protecting the quarterback.
 
We have to improve, Amon Simon had a pretty decent game and a lot of the pressures were late, forcing the quarterback to throw it sooner.
 
On playing at home against West Florida: When you lose it gives you fuel in your gut, actually when you lose you perform an autopsy on your game plans and figure out what went wrong and we will all be better coaches.
 
We will all understand what we can and can’t do as a football team, but it’s that feeling you get in your stomach when you lose, that you just hate and every one of those kids in that locker room right now hates that feeling and that is the fuel that has to drive us to success.
 
On Defensive Line: We lost contain in the end, it’s the little things we’re not doing well right now. A great defense, is playing in symphony and we are playing a little too much jazz. We all have to be on the same page we can’t adlib. We had some guys adlibbing today and that is one of the things we have to work on.
 
On Offensive performance: We started the game at 85 or 86 yard drive which really pleases you to start a game like that. I am really pleased when Eric Rodriguez came in there. His first drive in the third quarter was a long drive and successful, we’ve have to be more consistent at that position, we’re missing too many receivers that are open, that is something that we’ll look at this week too.
 
Texas A&M University-Commerce Free Safety Alex Shillow
On overall thoughts on the game: We started fast. It was exciting to see our offense get rolling and defense being just stingy in the first half, so really excited going into half time and coming back out offense driving down there did a great job the corner touchdown right at the start of the half.
 
We have to finish strong, there were some plays at the end that we wish we had back, a lot of it was us not on them and so that are some things that we’ll get on the table and we’ll learn and we know we just have to make the plays when they come to us.
 
This one stings, but our goal is just focusing on Monday, can’t wait to get out there.
 
On team mindset going into fourth quarter: We had a lot of energy the whole game, some fourth downs that we let them get away from us and didn’t get out to them on third downs early in the fourth quarter. That kind of killed us and just extended the drive and that’s what really hurt us there late in the game, just not getting off the field when you’re supposed to.
 
We played with a lot of energy all game. Bad things happen, we still got out there and we had a good few plays but then third down came around and we just couldn’t get off the field. It’s game of inches but we got to win those battles.
 
On next week’s game against West Florida: We’ll be focusing on them come Monday, we’ll do our corrections and turn all eyes on them. When you lose a game like this, you just can’t wait to play the next one and so we’ll rest up this week, we’ll heal up, and we will focused to go on Saturday.