On Monday, Liberty special teams coordinator Tanner Burns met with the media to discuss his unit’s performance through the early part of the season. Liberty’s special teams had an explosive game with three touchdowns and a blocked punt.

Here are some of the highlights of Burns’ interview session:

ON THE SPECIAL TEAMS’ PERFORMANCE THUS FAR

“Truthfully, we tried to cost our football team two games early on in the year between, obviously, the FIU game is one we would all like to forget and even last week with four penalties against North Alabama. That’s not acceptable, that’s not why I came here. I think I was hired for this job to help us try to win football games, not just prevent us from losing them.”

ON DEMARIO DOUGLAS AS A PUNT RETURNER

“Last year, he redshirted and was the scout team punt returner. We struggled tackling him a little bit. You watch him play wideout and you watch him go do one on ones, and he’s a tough cover. He makes guys miss all the time, every day. That’s the first thing you look for. (Another) is courage to field it and not just fair catch them all. There’s going to be somebody free on almost every punt return. You’re going to have to make someone miss and create a play on your own. Stubbs has done that, he did a great job for us back there last year, but right now I feel like Demario gives us the best chance to give us those explosives.”

ON ALEX BARBIR’S PERFORMANCE THROUGH 4 GAMES

“I expected there to be some growing pains. The guy hasn’t played in a football game since he was a senior in high school. He kicked off later in his time with Penn State. If you do anything and you stop doing it for 3 years, it’s going to take some time to get back into it. We all want him to make all of his field goals on Saturdays, I do, nobody does more than Alex Barbir, I promise you. There’s a point in practice he made 34 straight field goals. It’s one of those things, we know he can do it. It would be one thing if I knew I didn’t have a very good kicker and told coach we better go for it, but he made 34 kicks in practice. It’s not like they were all PATs. We move him all over the place – deep, short, left hash, right hash, middle of the field. He got one blocked, which is on me, that was against Western Kentucky. That was going to be in. Then he missed one off the post against North Alabama that was a good hit. He just has to lock in to do his steps, his routine, his rhythm. I’m happy for him that he built on making the two last week and hopefully he’s got those jitters out of his way and he’s confident.

ON TEAMS KICKING AWAY FROM SHEDRO LOUIS

“Teams are smart, they’ve done their homework, but when we do get our opportunities, we’ve got to make them pay for it if a team decides to kick it. We have a not my man mentality on kickoff return. My man’s not going to make the play, I don’t care who I’m blocking, where I’m blocking him to. We’ve got to have a not my man mentality. Last week they kicked it to us twice and we didn’t make them pay for it. We’ve got to, whether it be personnel, my call. That’s the second time I called a field return against a short kick, that’s a bad call. You can’t do that, it’s too hard to get over there against a short kick. But when we have our chances, if teams are going to kick it to him, we’ve got to make them pay for doing so. We look forward to getting some momentum back on that unit. He’s dynamic back there and it’s my job to get the right calls to let him go be special like he was in the past.”