University of Southern Mississippi Athletics
"A Good Week of Practice; We're Ready"
10/10/2002 12:00:00 AM | Football
"A Good Week of Practice; We're Ready"
Hattiesburg, Miss. - Southern Miss put an exclamation point on its week of preparation for Saturday's game at South Florida with a solid Thursday practice that left Head Coach Jeff Bower pleased with the entire week.
"It has been a good week of preparation for us," he said. "I think we've worked hard. We just need to go out and play well. We played hard at Alabama, just not well enough to win, and we didn't play as well as we needed to at Army, even though we won that game. But that's behind us and our players know that we have to play well to win. If we play like we did the last two weeks, we won't win the game. Our players have a lot of respect for South Florida, they're a far different, far better team than the one we played two years ago."
Bower says the further into the season a team goes, the easier it gets to put in a game plan each week. "We're more experienced now, the younger guys have been through it for several weeks, and we've found out what our niche is," he said. "We've found out what we do well early in the season, you tend to go back to that a little more often, and that becomes your bread and butter," Bower said.
But not that much changes each week as you get further into the season. "You always throw some wrinkles in there, and you make some adjustments," Bower said. "But you don't make any wholesale changes in your base package, on either side of the ball. If you do something new, it's usually pretty much within your package. There might be a minor change here or there, but nothing major. You just don't make major changes this time of the year, especially not when you're 4-1."
The Eagles go into the game in perhaps better shape, physically, than they've been in, in recent weeks. That will improve the depth situation at a couple of positions that had gotten somewhat thin after playing five straight weeks, on top of a rigorous fall practice session.
The South Florida game ends a three-game road trip that will have seen the Eagles go from Alabama, to West Point, N.Y. (Army), to Tampa, Fla. (South Florida). The game in Tampa also will be the first there for the Southern Miss football team since a P.W. Underwood team beat Tampa, 11-10, in a late-November game to end the 1974 season.
Following the South Florida game, Southern Miss will return home for an Oct. 19 homecoming game against Cincinnati, at 1 p.m., ct. A variety of events are scheduled in connection with that homecoming game, and tickets remain available at the Athletic Ticket Office in The Ferlise Center, or by calling 601-266-5418 or 1-800-844-TICK.
