They said it: Neal Brown
November 24, 2008
There may or may not be a press conference today. I won’t be there, because I’ve got desk resposibilities tonight and Arkansas State plays North Texas Saturday, and talking to Neal Brown about ASU sack artist Alex Carrington or Jeremy Rowell about ASU dual-threat and experienced quarterback Corey Leonard does no good today if they get hurt Saturday.
But I do have a few quotes I got from him about Troy’s 48-3 win over UL-Lafayette. The Trojans ran for 391 yards, including a career-high 234 from DuJuan Harris. I’d figure he’s a shoo-in for Sun Belt Offensive Player of the Week, but I’m not sure what the rest of the league did.
“The plan was definitely to run for a couple of reasons,“ Brown said. “They do a lot of movement - they move around quite a bit and we felt like we could because we’ve had success with it against them the past couple of years. We wanted to get the ball to DuJuan because he’s played really well the past three weeks.“
“I’m not hung up on throwing it. We just threw it against LSU because we had to do that to win.“
The rest of the run game was solid, as Kennard Burton ran five times for 66 yards, Maurice Greer ran 8 times for 30 yards and Xavier Moreland ran 9 times for 56 yards. The only problems were ball security - Harris lost a fumble after his career-long 67-yard run and almost lost another one. Greer had one ruled as a fumble, but replay overturned that when it showed his knee was on the ground.
“I was really pleased with the running backs in every regard,“ Brown said. “Except for the fact they put the ball on the turf. DuJuan did a great job of making people miss in space and the O-Line did a great job of getting push. John (Schlarman) did a great job coaching them on that last week.“
Levi Brown threw just 16 passes, hitting 7 for 51 yards. In all honesty, that statline probably took him out of any all-conference honors, but he wasn’t too sad about it after the game. Neal Brown was fine with how his quarterback played.
“We were going on what the defense was giving us,“ Neal Brown said. “There were times we’d think they were going to stack the box, but we lined up and they were still in coverage, so we ran it. Levi had one ball dropped and had to throw four out of bounds. He managed the game well and we caught them in some substitution mistakes, and Levi’s the one that gets us going on that.“
I’ll have some Know your Coach segments with Shayne Wasden and Benjy Parker this week and who knows what else. There’s a sport called basketball Troy is playing Tuesday night, and I plan to cover that. The women play at 5:15 and the men right after that against Georgia State.
