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OPENING STATEMENT
Good afternoon to everybody. I will take a couple of minutes to talk a little bit about the weekend and then certainly Colorado State. First of all, it's always good to get the victory. It's number one on the list, and we basically have two goals every week, to try to win the game that's at hand and hopefully show some growth as a football team. And obviously, looking at the score, it always makes it easy to determine the first, but I think the second one is a little bit harder to gauge coming off the field.
And after watching the tape, I think we saw a lot of really good things, especially up front on both sides of the line of scrimmage. Got a lot of young players playing on both sides of the ball, or inexperienced players. Really pleased with some of the things we saw. Just little intricate details and good reactions by guys that maybe weren't doing things quite as well a couple of weeks ago. We thought we saw some growth there.
Certainly offensively, pleased with that drive we had in the second quarter. And I thought we did a lot of good things. The play that got taken back, the third down reception impacted the game in a lot of ways, just the momentum, that type of thing, but outside of that I thought we saw some good things. And then, defensively, anytime you give up seven points you're happy about that, and that's first and foremost on defense.
But the big play, we got victimized by some big plays, and that's not good at any time. As I said Saturday, I thought special teams impacted the game pretty positively for the most part, but we missed some opportunities there, too, and they were really close. All that being said, just a lot of room for growth for our football team. A lot of good things, but a lot of errors we can still improve on for sure.
Moving to Colorado State, we've got the four captains that we started with, Tyler Linderbaum, Matt Hankins, Jack Koerner and Spencer Petras. They'll be the four captains out there Saturday. On the injury front, Kyler Schott came out of the game pretty good, and he's not in great shape yet, playing shape, but at least he's moving in the right direction. So he'll be back. And then, unfortunately, Ethan Hurkett is going to miss some time here. He incurred an injury in the second half, I believe it was. So he'll be out.
Colorado State is coming off a really impressive win, a good win, over Toledo, who took Notre Dame to the wire the week before that. So it was a good road win for them certainly, their first road trip. Their staff is a really good staff. Coach Addazio was up at Boston College when we played them in the Pinstripe Bowl. So certainly familiar with his past. And you see a lot of similarities between what they were doing at Boston College and what they're doing at Colorado State, not only in terms of scheme, but also the way their guys play. They're a big team, physical team, especially up front. They do a good job there. They've got a big running back; BC had a good running back, a big physical guy last time we played them. I think the quarterback is doing a really nice job for them, and basically, again, they just have good size, physical team, and they don't beat themselves. They're really sound. Do a good job protecting the football, don't give up easy things and have done a nice job there. And the only thing I would just interject you're probably going to see as good a tight end as there is in the country. They've got a guy who's really playing well, a local guy from right there in Fort Collins, I believe. He's a really good football player. His brother is a good player, too, but he's an outstanding tight end.
That's kind of what we're looking at right now and trying to get ready for. If you look at this season as if it were a game, we're about a quarter to done right now. It's gone fast. It always goes fast once it gets going. It takes forever to get going. That first game week is always lengthy, but nonetheless, it just illustrates, again, we got a really long road in front of us right now, a lot of football ahead still and a lot of opportunity with that. But all that being said, our focus right now is just what I said earlier, getting ready for this game and also trying to improve. And that's always a two-fold task as we go from that.
We are excited to be at home. We have Bradley Stephens, the Kid Captain. He's a nine-year-old from Gladbrook, Iowa, and he'll be with us on Saturday. That being said, I'll throw it out for questions.
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