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 cancellation of the season opener against Nicholls State, the health of the team and got his take on the opening weekend of college football action.

bleedCrimson.net: Talk about the cancellation of the game and talk about how it affects the team's preparation.
Hal Mumme: Well, everybody's disappointed first because we didn't get to play this week but all that kind of pales in comparison to what the people in Louisiana are having to go through. Our thoughts and prayers are with the million or so people who lost electricity in Louisiana. Hopefully all the levees hold and they can get back to life as usual.

We approached it from the standpoint that if life gives you lemons make lemonade. We said, "Alright we want to go to a bowl game at the end of the year. This is going to be great. We're going to get to play a great opponent in two weeks and we're going to treat it like bowl preparation time. So this week we're spending a lot of time on fundaments, special teams, things of that nature and probably on Saturday we'll move into our Nebraska phase and get ready for them.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie head football coach Hal Mumme throughout the 2008 season. This week Coach Mumme checks in and shares his thoughts on spring game, the receivers and running backs and what the schedule for the kids will be heading into August's training camp.

bleedCrimson.net: Talk a little bit about the spring game on Saturday.
Hal Mumme: The best thing is we didn't get anybody hurt. I thought our defense the last two workouts including Saturday night really started to come together. Joe Lee had to teach a new system, he's moved guys around, he's probably still not through doing that. The last two workouts they really started looking like Joe Lee Dunn defenses.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie head football coach Hal Mumme during the 2008 season. This week Coach Mumme checks in and shares his thoughts on spring practice so far, gives some insight on late signee Darrius Preston and talks a little about tomorrow's scrimmage.

bleedCrimson.net: Can you talk about your thoughts on the first three weeks or so of spring practice?
Hal Mumme: I like the kids' efforts and I like our speed overall. In the past Chris Williams was a fast guy, Tonny Glynn was a fast guy, Vincent Butler was a fast guy, we had spots, Jamar Cotton was a fast guy, we had three or four people that were fast. I really like our overall speed better. We're deeper, there are a lot of backup guys that can run too, particularly at receiver and running back and defensive back.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie head football coach Hal Mumme during the 2008 season. Coach Mumme talks about his 2008 recruiting class including his JUCO signing class.

bleedCrimson.net: Can you talk about the kids you signed in December?
Hal Mumme: They're all here now doing a pretty good job.

There's Seth Smith, running back originally from Oakland, CA, College of the Sequoias, Seth was a terrific player in an offense very similar to ours. He was a Rivals Top 10 JUCO running back, one of the top ten running backs in junior college in the nation. He was a preseason All-American in '07. He really does a great job of catching the ball, running with the ball, pass blocking, he can do everything we want to do. He's a bigger version of Tonny Glynn, real fast guy. He has really good speed.

Marcus Anderson is a wide receiver. The best way I can describe Marcus is he's a Derek Dubois with a lot more speed. He's been clocked in the 4.3s. Those are pretty reliable times because he was a track guy at Austin LBJ and we know a lot about that program over there. He's caught 84 balls in his career so far, he's also a return guy. In high school, he was kind of a halfback so he's real good after the catch.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie head football coach Hal Mumme during the 2007 season. This week Coach Mumme talks about Fresno State and the rain, the offseason schedule for the coaches, hiring a new defensive coordinator and what he'd do to tweak the BCS.

bc.net: Can you talk a little bit about the game?
HM: I was proud of way our kids fought, the game was kind of like the entire season, we just came up a few plays short but Fresno's a really good football team. They've done a nice job with playaction passes, we knew it would be a problem going in and it ended up being a problem but we did a better job than I thought we would.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie head football coach Hal Mumme during the 2007 season. This week Coach Mumme talks about his seniors, the bye week and what defensive coordinator Woody Widenhofer has meant to him and the Aggie program.

bleedCrimson.net: You've got a short week again this week, with Senior Night coming up on Friday night and another nationally televised game on ESPN2, you mentioned you were going to hold practice on Sunday, what's the teams' mental and physical state after having a week off?
Hal Mumme: I think it was good to have the week off. We rested more and ran some on Sunday, we did our Monday type workout since we have the game on Friday. We started day early. They're [the players] good. We had a good practice yesterday, and we're looking for a good one here today.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie head football coach Hal Mumme during the 2007 season. This week Coach Mumme talks about this past weekend's game against Utah State, Wes Neiman and the bye week.

bleedCrimson.net Can you talk a little bit about the game?
Hal Mumme: I was disappointed in the way we came out on defense. Offensively I was disappointed in the two turnovers, we didn't play like we need to play. Utah State played better than us. I don't have any excuses, we were outplayed, hats off to their coaching staff.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie head football coach Hal Mumme during the 2007 season. This week Coach Mumme talks about the travel troubles, the impact of the kickoff rule and containing Utah State's option attack.

bleedCrimson.net: The team didn't get into San Jose until 9:30 and then had to turn around and play a 1:00 game, what happened with that and how much of an effect did that have on the team? You had something similar happen with the trip to Idaho last year.
Hal Mumme: Last year was a lot worse. We came out ready to play, we had the opening stand on defense and forced a punt. Offensively we took it 70 yards and didn't get in end zone. Unfortunately Brandon Allen came down at 9 yard line so we had 1st and goal at 9. On the next play we lost 3 yards on a pitch to Jeremiah Williams. He just didn't make good cut. They've [SJSU] got great defensive backs and squeezed us in the endzone. Paul [Young] came in and kicked a nice field goal.

That wasn't it. It was a pain. The plane that was supposed to carry us over had mechanical difficulties on flight coming over to pick up us up. They had to turn it back and find a plane for us. We were supposed to leave at 11 a.m. we left at 6 p.m. We had dinner at around 10:00 our time.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie head football coach Hal Mumme during the 2007 season. This week Coach Mumme talks about the defense of Hawai'i, the team's motivation for playing another nationally televised game and what the Aggies need to do to come out with a win tomorrow night.

bc.net: Can you talk a little bit about the game?
Hal Mumme: The game didn't come out like we wanted to. Chase got hurt at end of 3rd quarter or early 4th quarter. J.J. McDermott got hurt late in game and couldn't throw, all we did was call run plays. I don't want to paint picture that it was on purpose, the Hawai'i guys called next day and apologized. They had 15 days to prepare for us and we had four to prepare for them. Then we had travel 3000 miles to go play them.

They put in a lot of defensive plays we hadn't seen.

We moved ball good but we're missing Chris Williams bad and it showed in the game. We're not scoring in red zone. Prior to his injury, we had 17 touchdowns and he caught 11 of them. He's a tough loss. We've got to have receivers step up in red zone.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie head football coach Hal Mumme during the 2007 season. This week Coach Mumme talks about the importance of winning last week's game against Idaho, Davon House's two interceptions and the upcoming game against Hawai'i.

bleedCrimson.net: Can you talk about the game and what getting a win after back to back tough losses in terms of regaining confidence or did the team ever lose any confidence?
Hal Mumme: Losing always hurts a team's confidence, regardless of the circumstances. It's always good to get a win. Everyone knew with the injuries that we were not operating on full tank, it's tough to take on Boise State, Ruston is tough even with everyone healthy, a bunch of teams have found that out. I think it helped them keep their spirits up. Getting a win was important, there are not any excuses to replace winning.