Liberty picked up a win on Thursday night, defeating Sam Houston, 21-16, to move to 5-0 on the season and 3-0 in CUSA play. Following the win, head coach Jamey Chadwell met with the media. Here is everything he had to say following the game, beginning with his opening statement:

“I told the team, ‘There’s no ugly babies. You get a baby, no matter what it looks like, you love it.’ We will take the win. It was a hard fought win, credit to Sam Houston, they played a great game, they competed, I knew they would. We found a way to hold on. We didn’t play great, part of that was because of them, part of that was because of coaching. We didn’t do a great job of getting our guys ready.”

“We found a way. I think when you try to be a championship program, you go through challenging games. Is there doubt? Did they waiver? Our guys didn’t waiver. We had a belief that somebody was going to make a play. We made it close. I told them, they had to go 99, we let them go 96. We got a stop there a couple times.”

“I’m pleased with the victory. Obviously, we know we can clean some things up. We don’t have a lot of time to do that, because we’ve got to flip around quickly. It was an emotional night for our guys, as well, because it is mental health awareness month, suicide prevention month. Obviously, we dealt with some of that. I think there was an emotional part of that, as well. But, we will take it. I think that’s 3-0 in the conference and 5-0. We will celebrate it.”

KOBE SINGLETON 3 PBUS ON 5 OF THEIR LAST OFFENSIVE PLAYS, HOW ABOUT HIS RESILIENCY AFTER THAT PI CALL?

“Yeah, that was a tough PI call. I thought we had some penalties go against us that hurt us. Some that could have been called that weren’t. For him to overcome that, specifically, the two in the end zone, huge plays. Almost picked the one off. Then, he had that one, that was big. We knew they were probably going to go to that guy. We put him over there for that reason. When he needed to step up, he made a huge play.”

“He’s probably the most competitive corner I’ve been around as far as everything is a competition and he rises to the top. It was good to see him mature. Normally if he gets a PI like that, that would have wrecked him. He would have been so upset, and he wouldn’t. He just got back there and played. That’s great for him. I’m pleased for him and his future.”

OFFENSE WITH A LOT OF YARDS, BUT NOT A LOT OF POINTS, OVERALL HOW DO YOU GRADE OUT HOW THEY PERFORMED?

“I think when we go back and look, you’re going to see some plays where if we hit them a little bit, we probably score some touchdowns. Then, you’ve got a lot of yardage and you feel pretty good about it. Our penalties set us back. We were sloppy there. There were some ones that made some third and longs, some foolish penalties. We get down there on the goal line and we get two bad calls back to back. We’re at the 5 yard line and we end up at the 20 or whatever. We didn’t help them from a coaches’ stand point, the offense. We need to watch the video, but we had plays to be made and somebody took their turn maybe not doing exactly what they should have and it cost us to not be able to execute at the level we needed to.”

“We got a wheel route run wide open and our receiver is supposed to run the right route, but he doesn’t, and he’s right there. That happens and then we had a guy get the wrong signal and he goes the wrong way and we get a tackle for loss. I think that was what I was most disappointed with, especially coming off an open week, you hope you execute a better play.”

“We moved the ball, but I think the penalties hurt us and we missed some things that could have really put that game out of hand. Then, you obviously miss the kicks and that makes it tight. Everybody is tight in there. You could probably squeeze some diamonds out of guys on the sideline over there it got so tight.”

A LITTLE THIN TONIGHT, HOW MUCH DID THAT FACTOR IN?

“Quentin getting banged up and Billy Lucas didn’t play. You’ve got some guys there. We had to use Aaron Bedgood more in certain areas. Then, they know you’re using him a certain way so they are able to identify that. Noah (Frith) was hurt, got hurt actually, I think it was in practice. He probably could have played if we had really, really had to, but not having a guy out there that can win one on ones consistently, because of the way they were trying to do things.”

“Here’s with our team, we are still growing. I think we all think we should be here, and we’re still learning. Everybody new that we’re playing, they do things different with the way they are playing us than on film. So, we adjust. When you have younger players, maybe it takes them a little longer to make those adjustments, and then you wish they were here longer in the process.”

“Am I disappointed how we finished on offense? 100%, we had a chance to finish the game, but I’m not disappointed int he result. I’m more disappointed in we could have executed better. That’s our goal, I want us to play our best and I will live with what happens. We didn’t play our best, but we found away. We will move forward and hopefully get better next week. We will need to be better next week.”

HOW MUCH DOES IT HELP FOR YOUR TEAM TO WIN IN A TIGHT GAME AND WITH YOUR DEFENSE ON THE FIELD TO SEAL THE VICTORY?

“If you are trying to be a championship program, you’ve got to go through those games that are close and can go either way and you’ve got to find a way to finish that. We had a chance to finish on offense with two consecutive drives. Missed a field goal and then went down and had to punt. We had a chance but didn’t, the defense had to. I think it’s good to go through that.”

“Let me say this, our crowd on that last drive, was outstanding. It was loud. The opposing team had to really listen. They were tremendous. We have an unbelievable home field advantage here. I want to give our student body and our fans a lot of credit because they made that a challenging place there, especially in that 4th quarter.”

HOW CHALLENGING IS IT TO PREPARE FOR A TEAM THAT IS WINLESS AND HAS A DIFFERENT LEVEL OF DESPERATION?

“You know they are hungry. You hope you are as hungry or even more. When you are desperate, you are going to play and lay it on the line because you want that joy in the locker room. The last two weeks they’ve had it and it’s slipped away. As I said, they have a championship program, championship mindset. We knew that they would play well, but also I thought we would play well and match that. I think we did. We wanted to win just as much as they did. You saw us compete for almost four quarters, we just didn’t execute cleanly and made that game there where we had chances to put it away. That’s the thing that I take from it. It wasn’t hard preparing for them, you knew what they were going to bring, but our program, our standard is the same.”

YOUR BIGGEST CHALLENGE NOW IS THIS QUICK TURNAROUND, HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH THAT?

“It obviously is a quick turnaround, anytime you play in a shorter week it’s challenging, especially if you go on the road. Your team, instead of having a day off tomorrow, they’ve got to come in and clean this one and put it to bed. Then, you’ve got to start getting ready for the opposing team. They obviously have a day jump start on you because they played last night. We did some planning and some practice for them during the bye week, so it’s not like it’s going to be brand new. I think the hardest challenge, not necessarily for the coaches but the players, is they are out of the routine of having a day off, working through these things. You’ve got to turn it quick and you’ve got to flip that switch, quick. We will have to be smart on how much we do tomorrow and Saturday, because this was a tough, physical game, but we’ve got to get ready to go down there and play a great team and go on the road in this league.”

CJ DANIELS HAD SOME TOUGH CATCHES, HOW MUCH DID THAT MEAN?

“When he made them, they were huge. They were obviously big moments whether they were third down or got us down in the red zone. He made some big plays. Even the ones that he missed, they were unbelievable, almost great catches. He made the misses look phenomenal. Anytime you’ve got a guy that you know if you put it in his vicinity, he’s got a chance to make a play, that’s a comfort level for the quarterback. We target him, and we had chances to make some big plays. We made a lot of them. We missed some too. Any time you have somebody you know, this guy is going to win, you feel good about him.”

HOW IMPORTANT WAS IT TO BE BALANCED OFFENSIVELY IN THE FIRST HALF?

“I’m looking here, we were 191 and 257 and we had some sacks. Obviously, you look at balance different. What is balance? It’s not like even-even. It’s can we run it when we need to run it? To be able to make the throws that we were able to, but also we didn’t have all the explosive plays. We had some big ones. The challenge with our running game is we would get a great play on first down and then on second down someone would blow an assignment and it would be 3rd and 6 instead of 2nd and 3. It was one of those games there from that, trying to be balanced, you almost got out of some of your game plan because of what was happening and maybe some stuff they were doing to us and how we weren’t performing to the capability that we could.”

THERE WAS A WHISTLE IN THE FINAL MINUTE THAT GAVE THEM AN EXTRA TIMEOUT, WHY WAS THAT WHISTLE BLOWN, WHAT DID THEY SAY?

“What did they say? I was probably yelling at them so I don’t know what they said. I thought they pushed our quarterback out of bounds and 15 yards. If we would have done that we would have had a 15 yard penalty. I think it was something they were trying to see if hew as down or not. I can’t remember exactly what he said. There was a lot of emotions there, especially on the PI and then it went down there. They have a hard job and they did a nice job there. I’m going to go ask what he told me, I can’t remember. I obviously didn’t like it.”