BATON ROUGE — After enjoying the season-opening victory over Tulane for the usual 24 hours, LSU head coach Nick Saban turned his focus to Utah State in his weekly press luncheon on Monday afternoon.
LSU takes on the Aggies on Saturday night at 7 p.m. in Tiger Stadium. The Tigers (1-0) are coming off a 48-17 victory, while Utah State fell to in-state rival Utah, 23-19, on Saturday.
Coach Saban addressed the play of the Tigers against Tulane, the defensive inprovement of Utah State, his injuries from the past game, his team’s philosophy of “taking one game at a time” and the true freshmen who played in the game, among other things.
LSU head coach Nick Saban:
“After watching the tape of the game I was probably most impressed with the way our players competed in the game. I thought we played hard in the game. For the first game I thought we tackled pretty well. We did well on third down on both sides of the ball. We did well in the red zone both offensively and defensively. We made some big plays on special teams that had a huge impact on field position. The field position was controlled very well by the way we played on special teams.”
“Like all first games there are a lot of things that you see that you need to work on. Our timing in the passing game needs to be stronger. We need to put a hat on a hat more consistently in the running game. On defense we played pretty decent, but they got over 200 yards on six plays. Any team?s nemesis for a good defense is giving up big plays. We have to give Tulane some credit because they have a lot of kids who are capable o making plays. We need to cut down on the big plays we give up.”
“Solomon Lee was injured the most seriously, but not too serious. He will be questionable for Saturday, but not ruled yet for Saturday. Michael Clayton and Domanick Davis have bruised knees, they will be out of practice today, but they should be back very soon. Stephen Peterman has a hip pointer, he will be day-to -day.”
“Utah State is coming off a tough loss to their in-state rival Utah. They have some guys with big play potential on offense and their defense is much improved. Emment White, RB is an outstanding back, he is on the Doak Walker candidate list. Their quarterback, Jose Fuentes is a big strong good looking passer.”
“Utah State is capable of giving us a lot of problems. They do a lot of different things that are going to be different for us. We will have to have a good week of preparation in order to be successful. Our focus is primarily on us and what we need to do. We need to take another step toward being a dominant team and try to improve relative to that.”