As Liberty gears up for Saturday’s game against Louisiana-Monroe, Hugh Freeze met with the media on Thursday to give an update on his team’s week of practice.

“I thought we had a good week,” said Freeze. “I believe in my heart that we’re going to respond well to not being at our best in the first half last week. I’m excited about it. I hope I’m right. I think they understand the message, understand they’re playing a very good football team that is starting to come into their own and get their identity. It will be a good test for us and see if we can pass the test this Saturday.”

Below are the 5 most interesting comments from Freeze from his Thursday press conference …

FLAMES PREPARED FOR WET WEATHER SATURDAY

“We can’t control how many people are in the stands, what the weather is like, where we play, what the grass is like. We don’t worry about the elements like that. We prepare for them, certainly. We’re doing wet ball drills after practice today and yesterday, so we will prepare for whatever situations come, but worrying about something you can’t control is not what I want to be in our DNA. We try to prepare for everything we can, but certainly not worry about things we can’t control.”

WILLIS ADJUSTING TO ARM SLING

“(Willis was) very inconsistent on Tuesday and part of Wednesday, looked really good today. Confident that he’s getting used to it. It’s just heavy, kind of feels different as he’s throwing with it, but he looked good today.”

“I think it just feels so different. It looked like to me on tape of Tuesday, like he was trying to hold his brace to his body as he’s throwing it and it wasn’t really clearing his hips and release his left side. I think he’s gotten accustomed to it because today he was really throwing it well.”

ULM MUST TRAVEL AMID HURRICANE DELTA

“Ian (McCaw) does a phenomenal job of always communicating with the other teams with issues like that. I’m quite sure we would be accommodating in whatever ways would help them, if that’s needed. I really haven’t heard anything other than Ian and I talk and, obviously, that’s a concern, but I haven’t heard any reason that it’s a concern I need to be involved with. I know Ian and them will accommodate them any way we can.”

FLAMES EXPECTING SOME UPTEMPO FROM ULM

“They were successful with (tempo) last Saturday, so we have obviously gone against our defense this week and giving them tempo to hopefully help them prepare for it.”

LU SECONDARY TO BE TESTED

“We certainly think it’s going to be our biggest challenge to test our pass defense more so than any game we’ve played. I’m excited to see where we stack up to it. We always feel confident in our plan. Certainly, after today’s practice, we will go through everything and have the final hatchet out if we don’t like something or our kids don’t understand something it needs to get removed but we will be confident in our game plan. Our kids are confident on defense right now, but we haven’t had a test quite like we will have Saturday. We will see how we fare. I’m excited about that opportunity to see how our DBs fare. I wish we were a little deeper back there but that is what it is right now. We’ve got to play some snaps. We’re fortunate that our defense hasn’t had to play a lot of snaps in a game, hopefully that will be the same case Saturday.”