HELENA — Ahead of Carroll College’s final home game of the regular season Saturday afternoon with Frontier Conference foe and eighth-ranked Southern 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: What a win you guys are coming off of. You go to the No. 12 team in the country, College of Idaho, and you knock them off. What let that happen?
Troy Purcell: Yeah, it's dedicated players and coaches, you know, and belief — believe when we can go down and they do that and have a great week of practice getting better each day and continuing. Again, stack and practice and stacking good days and believing.
MTN Sports: You guys got that funny little number in front of your name now — No. 21 in the nation, Carroll College. Does that give the guys any sort of extra belief in themselves, or is it more so people are finally catching up to what we already knew?
Troy Purcell: You know, we can see ourselves at practice when we got to practice against each other, and a lot of times we're the hardest opponent that we're going to face when we go offense versus defense. And the belief has been there. It's always been there. You know, we got to play some good ranked teams in order to get yourself an opportunity to be ranked.
And, we just got to get up in the rankings. Get in that top 20, and then you give yourself a chance to get to the playoffs.
MTN Sports: One of the biggest things you said you wanted to improve on this season was the explosiveness of the offense. Why has this offense continued to get better and better — and particularly more explosive?
Troy Purcell: Well, Jack (Prka), one thing, is an unbelievable player. And again, three offensive linemen have seven games (of) experience, three receivers have seven games experience. And so putting that together and building on that and growing that.
But having playmakers on the outside for Jack, having a line be able to hold up for Jack to get the ball, because when Jack gets the ball off, good things happen.
MTN Sports: So let's talk about Southern Oregon. They're coming to your building. It's your final home game of the season. What do you need to do to walk away with a win?
Troy Purcell: We got to get Blake (Asciutto) off balance as a quarterback. He's an outstanding big, tall ... he's a big, big, big large human. And, you know, (Gunner) Yates is an unbelievable running back. Probably the best running back in the league, right now. Because, man, he's got some twitch.
He's got some jump-cut ability. So we've got to maintain those guys, keep him in front of us. No big plays. And then the opposite on the other side.
