HELENA — Ahead of Carroll College’s home date Saturday afternoon with Frontier Conference foe Eastern Oregon, MTN Sports' Jonny Walker sat down with Fighting Saints head coach Troy Purcell.
A full transcript from the video interview is available below:
MTN Sports: It's been a little while. You guys have been on your bye week. How did you kind of spend that time off?
Troy Purcell: It's an opportunity to deep dive and get back into skill development. Special teams and, you know, basic, fundamental football. Again, you know, you kind of get away from it after fall camp because your game planning and things.
So, it gives us a deep dive on our tendencies and things that we're doing. And, you know, try to develop some different tendencies the second half of the year.
MTN Sports: What do you make of the timing of the bye week with it coming directly halfway, midpoint of your season?
Troy Purcell: Yeah. Two years ago we had a bye week right exactly during fall break again. And we won our last five games. And won the conference after that. And last year, we didn't have that bye week. And we didn't perform very well the second half (of the season).
So, we're going to go with the first formula and see how that pans out. So, everything is determined on this first game coming back.
MTN Sports: Well, let's talk about that game. What does Eastern Oregon do that other teams don't do? What is unique about what they present?
Troy Purcell: It's always a battle versus Eastern Oregon. Coach (Tim) Camp will have those guys ready to go, and they'll come in here hungry. And it's going to be a four-quarter battle and down to the last series.
And offensively, you're going to see a mobile quarterback. You know, he likes to run, is the leading rusher for their team. And they like to throw it. And they'll sling it.
MTN Sports: You mentioned they have a mobile quarterback. Preparing for that, your guys on defense, are they able to watch kind of what Jack Prka does, his mobility in practice? Or do you have kind of a mobile scout-team guy in there? What's going on there?
Troy Purcell: Joystick Jack is probably not the most mobile quarterback we've had. He does extend plays, and we do have some stuff designed for him. But his strength is definitely in his throwing arm.
We have a couple backup quarterbacks that have a little more wiggle, I would say. Not again anything against Jack. I love Jack. But yeah, we try to get a feel for what it's going to be like and then design packages to stop a mobile type quarterback and make him throw the ball.
