bleedCrimson.net Weekly Coach Mumme Interview

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Coach Mumme throughout the 2008 season. This week we talked with Coach about the team's tough loss to Fresno State, Chris Williams, what each position on the offensive line is responsible for, the upcoming game against Louisiana Tech on Senior Day and five of the seniors who deserve recognition for their contributions to the team.

bleedCrimson.net: Your overall thoughts on the game? It was a tough loss and this is the third straight year you've played Fresno State down to the wire and they're a perennial power in the WAC.
Hal Mumme: Yeah, we're closing the gap on them. If you look at the three schools that were picked to be the conference champions, Boise we didn't play well against, that was really the pinnacle of when we had everybody hurt. Then Fresno we had them down to the wire and Nevada we beat. I think we're closing the gap there, we're just not doing it as fast as everybody would like.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Coach Mumme throughout the 2008 season. This week we talked with Coach about the team's loss to Hawai'i, the return of Marquell Colston and Marcus Anderson, the effect of not having Wes Neiman, the upcoming Fresno State game and a few other topics.

bleedCrimson.net: What are your thoughts on Saturday's game? The offense played better than it had in the previous three weeks. How much of that can be attributed to the offensive line starting to come together and how much of that can be attributed to Marquell Colston returning?
Hal Mumme: I think the missing piece that nobody's talking about in that whole deal is Marcus Anderson got to play and practice all week. The two previous weeks, he got hurt early in the San Jose game and played in the Idaho game some but was only about 75%. I really think putting number 10 in that slot really takes a lot takes a lot of double coverage off of 28.

Marquell didn't play all that much, he had five carries, he had a couple that were pretty decent. I think he was a threat they had to worry about. I think more than anything else the thing that helped open things up was number 10.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Coach Mumme throughout the 2008 season. This week we talked with Coach about the team's loss to #11 Boise State, which players might be coming back from injury, the upcoming Hawai'i game, Rick Pitino and Mike Leach.

bleedCrimson.net: Start with your thoughts on Saturday's game.
Hal Mumme: They're good. I haven't seen that much across the board defensive talent in this league before. I think Hawai'i had a great defense last year, I think San Jose State has a great defense this year. They are deep. I would watch four guys come in and four guys come out the whole game. I kept thinking there'd be a dropoff and we could handle this guy or that guy but there was no drop off. I was really impressed with their defensive speed overall.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Coach Mumme throughout the 2008 season. This week we talked with Coach about the team's play against Idaho, the injury status on offense and the upcoming game against #11 Boise State.

bleedCrimson.net: What are your overall thoughts on the game.
Hal Mumme: Well you know we're not real happy with it. I thought our defense really played good enough to win. Offensively we've lost so many players, we just didn't get it done. We didn't have a run game and our five couldn't block their four. Again, it's the second week in a row it's been like that. We've gotta figure out something because two of those guys we're not going to get back. We lost Brandon Perez, that really hurt us in the second quarter when he went out because [Marquell] Colston didn't travel so we were down to our third back. Chase was back there and we just became too one dimensional.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Coach Mumme throughout the 2008 season. This week we talked with Coach about the team's 31-14 loss to San Jose State, the outstanding defensive performance, $581,851.90 raised for Cowboys for Cancer Research and the upcoming game against Idaho.

bleedCrimson.net: What are your thoughts on the game overall? The defense played well, the defense allowed just 201 yards of total offense, 150 yards rushing and 32 of that came on the touchdown run by Yonus Davis.
Hal Mumme: Yeah. Yonus Davis had I think 104 yards but he got 32 on that first drive. We've gotta stop deferring! That's two weeks in a row! After that they played like gangbusters. I tell you what, the big improvement the defense made was where we wanted them to make it, in the D-line. They really came on and played well. I told our guys today, we're 3-3, we're halfway through the season trying to get bowl eligible and you've gotta look at it as is the glass half full or half emtpy? I think it's half full. This time last year we were kind of in nearly the same situation but we were sitting there saying, "Well if we don't score every time we've got the ball, we don't really have a chance." I think it's a whole different mindset this year. A lot of that is attributed to those guys [the defense]. You watch them and it was like watching two heavyweight fighters out there. I'm sure their team's beat up today too. It was a battle.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Coach Mumme throughout the 2008 season. This week we talked with Coach about the team's 48-45 victory over Nevada, some of the effort plays, the Tough Enough To Wear Pink campaign and the upcoming game against San Jose State.

bleedCrimson.net:: What are your thoughts on the game overall?
Hal Mumme: I was proud of the way our guys hung in there and fought. We had some great plays, we had some bonehead plays. The main thing is we fought until the end and came home with the win.

bc.net: The offense was three for three on 4th down including that big 4th and 20.
HM: Our guys are learning to attack pretty good. The long one there, I asked Joe Lee and he said, "Go for it," and so we did.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Coach Mumme throughout the 2008 season. This week we talked with Coach about the team's 45-10 victory over Alcorn State, the defense's play, talks about the progress of the team and looks ahead to the conference opener against Nevada.

bleedCrimson.net: Talk about the Alcorn State game overall. You won the game 45-10 but I'm sure you feel that there's probably at least three more scores out there you could have had?
Hal Mumme: Well obviously Marvin Betts created a plus and minus turnover deal there for us and gave up a score and we had two fumbles I wasn't real happy with. So yeah, the second half we weren't trying to run up the score, I could have kicked some field goals too. I just wanted to see our young guys play and make some plays, J.J. and Todd Lee and Julius Fleming and all those guys. So we left some points out there but I was kind of displeased with the turnovers.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Coach Mumme throughout the 2008 season. This week we talked with Coach about the team's loss UNM, Chase's performance against the rivals, Coach explains Chase's injury during the game, and we look ahead to the game against Alcorn State.

bleedCrimson.net: Talk a little bit about the game overall.
Hal Mumme: I was proud of the way our guys came out. We started out great and I think we played hard through the whole game. We had some unfortunate things happen. The biggest unfortunate thing that happened defensively was D-Rich (Derrick Richardson) getting hurt. Michael Zant came in and played pretty well but we couldn't replace D-Rich's experience. The thing that D-Rich does, the reason he leads the nation in tackling when we've only played three games and everyone else has played four or five, is because he recognizes things so fast and he just gets there. He makes the tackle at the line of scrimmage or for a one yard game. Michael's making them for five yard gains or eight yard gains. And Michael will get like that eventually, he's a good tackler and a good player but D-Rich is a senior and Michael's a freshman. That's probably the number one thing that hurt our defense because we weren't playing well on the d-line and we've really gotta work on that this week. We're going to kind of open that up to some competition. D-Rich had been covering up for our mistakes there.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Coach Mumme throughout the 2008 season. This week we talked with Coach about the team's big victory over I-10 rival UTEP, the defense's performance in the second half, special teams and look ahead to the game against UNM.

bleedCrimson.net: Can you talk about the mental toughness the team showed in the win on Saturday. They had a few tough breaks but every single time they responded.
Hal Mumme: Yeah, we made some boneheaded plays and dug ourselves a hole then we had the mental toughness to dig out of it. It was a team win and I thought the most important thing we did was play as a team.

bc.net: Talk about the 4th and 21 play that went for a touchdown.
HM: We kinda had a suspicion they'd play zone. We knew if they'd blitz us we'd get Marcus or Wes Neiman one on one or possibly Chris or A.J. But if we got man we'd get any of the four one on one matchups we'd like and Chase could choose pick the one he wanted. And if they played zone we had been talking about those seam routes. We thought they'd be there so it worked out.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Coach Mumme throughout the 2008 season. This week we talked with Coach about the team's opening game at Nebraska, the defense's performance, the J.J. McDermott to Julius Fleming connection and his thoughts on the upcoming game at UTEP.

bleedCrimson.net: Talk a little bit about the game.
Hal Mumme: Well you know it's a tough chore to have to go to Lincoln and play our first game and they're playing their third game. That's a hard place to win anyway and they're a good program and they've got good players. I thought our kids played hard but we didn't play good.

bc.net: One of the things I was impressed with was the lack of penalties for the first time out. The Aggies only had seven penalties for 50 yards.
HM: Yeah, we did okay on that. I was kinda shocked by that too. I thought we had more problems because of the crowd noise and stuff like that. We had the two sacks late in the game that were directly related to the crowd noise. And not getting in in the red zone, we didn't have penalties, we just had assignment busts where people couldn't hear and that was the one time I think we got the jitters. We had Mike Grady (62) in at center, it was after Richie Bolin (63) got hurt. And Mike played a good game but I thought we let the crowd noise get to us.