Liberty improved to 5-0 on the season and 3-0 in conference play following the team’s win over FIU on Tuesday night. Following the win, head coach Jamey Chadwell met with the media. Here is the video from his press conference and full transcript:

“Credit to FIU. I mean, they came up and played, played well. We’re up 14 points with what, six minutes to go, and had a chance to end the game, and they fought back to take that to overtime. So credit to them, and the way they played. I told our team that the ultimate objective is to find a way to win, which we did, and we’ve gotta learn how to finish. We gotta learn how to not beat ourselves in certain situations. But I was pleased that we found a way to win.”

“We got in overtime, and nobody on that sideline had any any doubt. They knew they were gonna win. I think the other side was hoping, we were knowing. There’s a big difference in that.”

“My job as a head coach, where I’ve got to figure it out, and I’ve not done it yet, is how we can start to finish, finishing games. We played better in the first half than we have in a long time, which was good. But we didn’t do the things necessary to really finish out the game the way we should have. Obviously, the fumble right there out of the gate in the third quarter. There’s some things that we know we got to improve.”

“I was worried about the time off, would we be rusty with timing and some of those things, but we overcame it. Listen, we will take it right now.”

Was there any doubt in your mind that Cooley was going to get the ball as much as he did late?

“No. We messed up there after they scored, 24-17. We go three and out. We messed up. We didn’t even give him the ball. That’s just not wise. We didn’t give him the football. He had been running well. We made our decision in overtime, we’re going to ride or die with him. We went down and scored. KSalt pulled the ball for the one play, but we were going to ride or die in overtime with him. We didn’t finish the game. If we’re going to go down, we’re going to go down getting the ball to our most productive player on offense. We made that decision. We’re getting the ball and we’re going to try to run down their throats and it happened. We didn’t do a good job to try to finish that game. We’re not going to let that happen again. He had to run more than he probably thought, because Billy (Lucas) got hurt a little bit. James Jointer was out. Billy and Q are the one-two punch. Billy got hurt there in the fourth quarter, I believe, hurt his ankle a little bit. We decided to ride Quinton. It was not 29 carries, were not in the game plan. But we needed all 29.:

Christian Bodnar, was it the plan to send him on the blitz to win the game?

“They had an RPO on where they were going to hand the ball off or pull it and throw it. They did that. We brought Christian off the edge, was the play, and we took away the quarterback’s first read. That was our whole goal, to take away his first read and make him have to go to a secondary one. Typically when he does that, there’s some inaccuracies. When he has his first read, he’s really good. He had to double clutch, that gave us enough time to get there. Then, for us to be able to get on the football there, because your natural reaction is to pick it up. I think one of our guys tried to. In that situation, we’ll get on it. Jolly did a fantastic job there. It was great call at that time frame. We had held them down the whole game until that fourth quarter there, just gave up fourth downs and gave up some of those.”

“I’m still trying to figure out the fourth and short call. It looked like the quarterback didn’t get any yards, and they got a first down. I gotta see the replay on that one, but we’ve gotta get off the field there. But that was a huge play for us, obviously the game. They’re going to go for two. I’m surprised he didn’t go for two when he scored with a minute and something left, to be honest with you. That’s why I took the time out, because I thought he’s going to go for two. I try to save us as much time as possible. He didn’t, but I knew he was going to in overtime, especially after that. So, it was a big play for us.”

50 rush attempts tonight, was that part of the game plan going in?

“No. We weren’t as accurate, we weren’t connecting in our pass game and some of the things that we did for whatever reason, maybe that was the timing from the layoff a little bit. Having that game speed, being able to do that, and the way they were playing us, not to get technical, but they were dropping a lot of people trying to just see if they could bend, not break and give up explosive plays. e got the point there. That was the thing that we knew we could count on. We knew if we handed it off, we felt like we could find a way to move the ball. We just weren’t as sharp as we needed to be in some of the other stuff, so that’s why we did that.”

What did you see in Jahmar Brown tonight and your run defense?

“You want to make them one dimensional. For the most part, up to that fourth quarter, I think they had like 200 something yards total offense. We were doing a good job. Jahmar was excellent. We had him hitting the gap on two or three different calls, and he basically tackled the quarterback and the running back at the same time. If you remember, I think it was, might have been UTEP or one of them, maybe East Carolina, he tackled one of them and let go the other one, the other one had the ball, He was smart this time. He held on to the running back and said, Hey, that’s it. He was huge. That put them in some challenging situations early. He actually got a big one there in the fourth quarter where we got a fourth down stop. I think that was one of the drives there. So he was tremendous. He played hard and did a good job for us there. I thought we did a good job of getting them behind the sticks. We just could not get off the field on those last two drive. We had them, I think, on 2 fourth downs, and then they got the big play, and they converted them. We’ve got to do a better job there. They got us on a couple things there late. I don’t know if we got tired or what, but
we gotta finish out.”

How hurt are you for Reese Smith?

“Hopefully it’s not as bad as it looked. It’s the same knee. But you know, anytime you’ve had an injury like that, sometimes, not to get medical. I do have a medical degree from Jamey Chadwell University. The scar tissue, sometimes you just pull the scar tissue and it feels worse than what it is. We’re hoping that’s what it is. That’s what we’re hoping. Maybe something shifted. We’ll find out. Hopefully it’s not nothing. He was in there in the locker room and seemed to be feeling better. So hopefully it’s not any structural damage. Hopefully it just may be one of those. We’ve got another open date here coming up, and so hopefully we’ll get some guys back. Because we were banged up coming into this with a lot of guys that we had been playing for us, didn’t play, and so hopefully in the next, how many days, we can get back healthy.”

What did you hear from the referees on the Cooley block?

“They said that he threw a shoulder in there, and he came back towards the line of scrimmage, which is a no-no. You either got to stay in there or you got to really extend his hands, and he extended his hands late. They said the key was you were coming back towards the line of scrimmage, and that’s not what you’re allowed to do. So we end up scoring off of it, which was good anyway, but some of those penalties that were called were a little challenging, but we overcome it.”

9 penalties for 90 yards, thoughts on that overall?

“Some of them, I think, were questionable. But the ones that I’m not, we had two offside penalties on the defense on PATs because they’re trying to block the kick, that’s unacceptable. I think we had a false start when they moved up front, and then they called a couple holding on us. One, that’s fine, the other one, you’re like, okay, but the ones that we can’t, the three that we’re lining up offsides, or the false start, those are the ones you really get frustrated on. They waved  one off on them. That’s where you get upset with officials, but I was way better tonight than I normally was.”

You said the team knew they were going to win, where do you think that mindset comes from?

“They know they’ve found a way to win in challenging situations. You’re a product of how you practice, good or bad. The old saying is practice makes perfect. I think it’s more practice makes permanent. How you practice determines how you’re going to do on a game. We practice those situations. We put ourselves in those situations. We’ve been in this situation before. We might not have been in overtime before, but we practice that. We’ve been in challenging situations. Not one person over there had a look in their eye, where we were like, oh man, what’s going on? We might lose. There was never that saying, Hey, we might lose. We might win, but it was never we might lose. There’s a big confidence in that. I think it comes from just continuing, knowing that we put ourselves in situations, we believe in each other. It might not have been perfect up to this point, but we’re going to do what we need to do. We scored in five plays, I think, there from the 25. It looked like we were a juggernaut. Then, defense got on there, on the third down and sack fumble. There was a renewed focus. There was never a doubt. I think it comes from those guys, the bond that they created and the time they’ve spent sacrificing for these opportunities. Our whole thing going in this game was we got to earn a game back, because we lost one. When you lose one like that, you don’t get many. You only get 12 guaranteed, and you want to earn more. So, now we only get 11 guaranteed, unless there’s another hurricane coming. Our whole thing about earning that back. I think that was our mindset, what do we have to do to earn this game back?

Another long layoff, what are the challenges that come with that, how do you plan for that?

“A couple things. One, we gotta get healthy. We’re missing a starter on defense. You’re missing some key role players offensively and defensively that play a big role. I’d like to see if we can get our team back to where we can be full throttle going forward. Two, the hardest part is because we missed that time, I think there’s a rhythm and routine you get into, especially offensively, and you’re off of it again. How can we continue to find our rhythm and all those things? We’ve got to do a good job of practicing hard and practicing a sense of urgency and a tempo where we’re going against each other, but also pull back because you’ve got 15 days. We’ll have a couple days off, but also you can’t practice 10 days in a row either at a high level. We gotta figure out what that balance is. I thought we had a good balance coming into this one based off of that. After watching the game, maybe I’ll say it’s terrible. So I gotta figure that out, but we gotta balance being hard and tough, physical practice, but also getting our guys to the race too. That’s the challenge you face, and making sure you’re ready for a game, but also not beat yourself up so much that the guys that you need to play are limping into it. So, there’s a hard challenge there. We’ll do something tomorrow, we’ll do something Thursday, we’ll do something Friday, and then we’ll let them have the weekend to recover. Then, we got Monday until the next Wednesday. So we got about 10 days there to figure out how we want to practice and some things. We’ll practice a good amount of time, but we’ll also have a couple days there where they can take some time to get their bodies where they need to be.”