I lament for UAPB because they're in that situation. We were in that very same situation, and we had to leave at 7 o'clock to go to Hammond and play the same day. We are all experiencing discomfort with hotel accommodations. Believe me, I don't like traveling the day of the game. Traveling the day of the game is a huge inconvenience for a football team.

That right there is a constant reminder for me. Not only have we gone through such a disaster that has affected all of our lives, but we've been blessed with the strength to move on.

It's the best decision we could have made. There's no way to play a game with everything going on. With everything that happened in New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, football is the last thing on people's minds.

We want to be able to find somebody who, if Tony goes down, can come in and we won't have a big drop-off.

The defense had some growing pains in terms of execution. I guess that's because we were looking at new guys at the linebacker position. And we're looking at some guys at free safety. Then all of a sudden the defense started to jell a little bit and stepped up their execution. They matched up to the intensity of the offense.

It depends on how well he does. We'll stick with him. If he does well, we'll stay with him. If not, we'll look at something else.

I watched some game film of him from the last time we played and I knew I had to keep him off the boards. I didn't even worry about points, just rebounding because you can't score if you don't have the ball.

He was just speaking as a football coach who is focused on the job at hand and that's winning. I really don't think he meant any harm. But if he had experienced what we did, his feelings would be the exact same as ours.

From what I hear, Hammond was hit harder than we were so it's probably good we're playing the game a couple of days later. It should give them more time to clean up. Considering everything that has happened with this hurricane, we're just happy to be playing, regardless of what day it is.

We have to find some strong safeties and free safeties.