Who are you looking to for leadership this season?
    All of our seniors; we have got a good group of seniors. The ultimate leadership is going to come from them.

Anybody in particular?
    Well … If you want to get in particulars you’ve got Josh Jeffries, John Mannino, Jerry Beard and Andrew Layton. Those guys are seniors, and they are leaders because the players picked them. I have just as much confidence in other seniors as I do in those guys. They are at a different level but we certainly have a lot of seniors that are very good leaders.

What are your strengths this season?
    After being 0-1, you begin to second guess yourself. (Chuckling) Being realistic, I would like to think that we have got good speed, and we are generally a very physical football team. I hope that with those two, we can develop a team that is of championship caliber. Then you start getting into individual talents. You get into the pass rushing of guys like Josh Jeffries, Leon Moore and K.T. Stovall. Then you have a guy like Mannino, a guy in the middle. Then we have our quarterback situation, you got Joe, you got Richie, you got your receivers. We got a hard runner like Jerry Beard, and Jose White. Then we have a guy like Sean Jackson who could be a game breaker kind of guy.

What are your plans for him?
    Well Jackson is a running back; he’s got great speed and quickness. He is a different kind of runner than Jerry, and he is a little bit different kind of runner than Jose. Jose is a little bit of both of them, a little bit of power runner and a little bit of the magic that Sean’s got too.

You mentioned the quarterback situation. Does the game plan change with the absence of Burchette?
    It doesn’t change drastically. We are going to do pretty much the things that your team believes in and that your staff believes in. Richie is certainly a good runner, but we are not going to develop into a team that has a huge percentage of run and option. We have got good receivers also and we have to get the ball moved around to those guys a bit more. I think if anything we may tone down some of the stuff we were doing overall and the next two or three weeks should be good for Richie. He only knew on Thursday that he was going to be starting Saturday at the Marshall game. We didn’t get to spend a lot of time with him. He got a lot of reps and stuff, and he was ready to play.
    You go back to when Burchette became the quarterback at East Tennessee State, well the next week we were playing Furman and we kind of cut things down for Joe. We didn’t give him the whole ball of wax when he became our starter. So we are going to do the same thing with Richie. Try to bring him on slowly and securely and where he has got a lot of confidence … He can go out there and run any play we have got, there is no problem with that. I think that we are trying to get him to a confidence level more than just being able to go run a play. That’s the way Joe was. He could run any play we wanted to as a sophomore, but certain plays he had more confidence in. That’s what we got to do with Richie, and it will be good for him in the next couple of weeks. I think that in about a week Joe will be working again. He won’t be able to play but he will be working.

When do you expect him to return?
    That could be anywhere from three to four weeks. It could be longer, but optimistically we are thinking three or four weeks … max.

I know that in the past you have run a multiple running back offense. Are you looking to do this again or is Beard your main go-to guy?
    Well that is going to depend on what these other two backs or three backs do in the next two or three weeks. We feel confident in our other backs, like I said Sean Jackson … The off week has been great for Sean Jackson. He’s the little back that is so quick and fast.
    I have got all the confidence in the world for Jose White. He can catch, he can run, I wouldn’t have any problems alternating he and Jerry Beard. Like I said, I have all the confidence in the world for those guys.

Preseason #2 in the nation and #1 in the Southern Conference, what are some of your major bumps on the road in fulfilling these predictions?
    Number one, those polls are just something to talk about around pouring a cup of coffee. (Laughing) It’s a neat thing for your fans and for the students on campus and your alumni and all that stuff, but it’s really just a starting point. It’s kind of like an airline schedule. An airline schedule is something you base the delays on, and I think the same way about those polls. They can juggle up and down, and I think that we have had one hard test in Marshall. What we do from this point is where our football is. I don’t worry about the polls or anything that people say or think or anything about stuff like that. I want us to be really good. I want us to be as good as we can be. If it is a slow gradual process so be it, as long as by the time we get to the conference play we’re hitting on all cylinders.

Who are you looking at to be tough in the Southern Conference?
    I think that every one of them might be. (Pausing) The Citadel over the past few years has been a down team … They played us to the wire last year. The point I am trying to make is that when we play The Citadel we are going to catch their best shot. They’re going to be as good as anybody we play when we play them. The next week we got East Tennessee State, which is as big of a rivalry that we’ve got. Their coach went to school here, they have always played us tough, always a tough game. Then you got Furman, Georgia Southern, Wofford, they are all hard, every one of them is going to be hard. I have always said that every one them are hard, because they are playing for the championship and playing to knock you off. There aren’t very many schools in our league that are calling and asking us to go fishing with them. Not very many people like us. That’s just the way we are. I have always thought that we pretty much just catch everybody’s best shot. I think that is a tribute to our players and our team.

So everybody is gunning for us?
    I think so … Like us, there are probably two or three teams that we try not to put any higher than another, but I think that you’ve got your Furman and Georgia Southern, East Tennessee and Western are ball clubs that year in and year out you better go beat them.

I know that Georgia Southern went through some major changes in the off season, by getting a new coach. Do you think that is going to affect their strengths?
    If he doesn’t play it won’t. They are going to be the same Georgia Southern. Programs like that program and our program I like to think are pretty established programs, and losing a coach doesn’t change that much. That guy can’t play, they are going to go changing their colors, change their defense, change their offense. I think another thing, those people didn’t lose any staff, they retained most of their coaching staff. That’s one of the most overlooked things in coaching is having some consistency and some continuity with in your staff. Head coaches leave and go to single A schools and don’t come back, so that continuity is what does it.