BATON ROUGE — The LSU football team concluded a two hour practice Wednesday afternoon at the LSU Practice Facility. The Tigers practiced in full pads in the third straight series of preparations for the Houston Cougars.
The Tigers opened practice with a brief warm-up and individual drill session before moving into seven-on-seven and then nine-on-seven drills. They also utilized the LSU scout teams in full team work.
“The one thing that I think our guys have been able to do is stay focused on what we’re supposed to do,” LSU head coach Nick Saban said. “We’ve had a good week of preparation, but we’ve got a long way to go to get where we need to be.
“We’ve had a couple of days of preparation, and we’ve had to work on a lot of different things because of the type of team this is. They do a nice job with their offense, and they play very well on defense. Dick Bumpas is good defensive coordinator, so that presents a lot of problems for us.”
The Tigers will practice again on Thursday afternoon and then walk through on Friday. Saturday’s game against the Cougars is scheduled for a 7 p.m. kick-off in Tiger Stadium. Tickets are still on sale at the LSU Ticket Office or by calling (225) 388-2184. You can also purchase tickets on the Internet at www.LSUsports.net.
QUOTES FROM LSU HEAD COACH NICK SABAN
“We’ve had a couple of days of preparation, and we’ve had to work on a lot of different things because of the type of team this is. They do a nice job with their offense, and they play very well on defense. Dick Bumpas is good defensive coordinator, so that presents a lot of problems for us.
The one thing that I think our guys have been able to do is stay focused on what we’re supposed to do. We’ve had a good week of preparation, but we’ve got a long way to go to get where we need to be.
There are some important areas that I think we need to be able to take advantage of in this game. Hopefully we’ll be able to do it in the kicking game. I think the key is the fact that they have good skill guys and a good quarterback. We are going to get challenged in that part of the game.
I’m not disappointed in the effort that we’ve had so far this week and how we’ve prepared for this game.
From and injury standpoint, Brandon Winey has practiced for the last two days. Mike Lillie is out there, but he is very doubtful for this game. Maybe we’ll get him back in another week or so. Other than that we’ve had a couple of guys nicked up a bit, but nothing serious.
(On a message for the team this week) I think the big message that I tried to give them is, like I said at the press conference on Monday, you couldn’t tell what the score was based on how they played, effort-wise. That was the good news. They played the game on the field like we wanted them to. They played for 60 minutes in the game, they played hard, they played tough, and we didn’t play differently regardless of what the score was in the game.
There wasn’t a whole lot of adversity to overcome in the game, and I think we are going to get challenged a lot more by this particular team. The real deal here is how do we respond to adversity in a game. How are we able to overcome it and continue to play and not get frustrated relative to the challenge of who we are playing against. We need to stay focused on what we are doing play in, play out so that we can play hard and compete well for 60 minutes.”