McNeese heads into week three of the season looking to find their footing

LAKE CHARLES, La. (KPLC) - Heading into week three of the college football season, the McNeese Cowboys are (0-2) for the third year in a row after falling this past weekend 49-7 on the road to the Florida Gators.

Head coach of the Cowboys Gary Goff came into the week waning to see fight from his team after their week one home loss to Tarleton State, and heading out of the weekend now he thinks the team has found things that they can build off of.

“Overall proud of the guys where they competed and I think it opened their eyes to a lot of things too if you play hard for four quarters you might not win every snap, but good things will happen and there’s not going to be anybody else on our schedule that has that much talent from top to bottom, so I’m really proud of the guys because you know, I we kept coaching hard one play at a time,” said Coach Goff. I felt that we didn’t play very hard the first week of the season, and as we continued to challenge them on every play Saturday night, I thought the guys were up to that challenge and we’re having fun, that’s kind of been our message to them for the last week and we will carry that over to this week.”

The speed of the match-ups that the Cowboys were faced with this weekend according to Coach Goff will be the fastest they will ever have to face this season, and he feels like that will carry over to helping his football team prepare for their next game on the road against an Alcorn team that likes to run the ball a lot.

“Everybody from here on out on the schedule is going to have some good players, but from top to bottom Florida was a pretty talented roster right there, at least from us coming up and playing an SEC opponent like that, but it does help us, the speed of the game was so fast Saturday night, and the speed of the game from here on out won’t be that fast, I think that is something we can kind of take from the experience and grow from it,” said Goff.

This week the Cowboys head into a familiar match-up as they will take on an Alcorn team that they lost to last season at home 30-19.

“They are an experienced team, they have 37 upperclassmen, and they have 18 seniors, so they have played a lot of football,” said Goff. “Defensively they returned seven starters and they are going to apply a lot of pressure with a lot of man coverage behind it, and then offensively, they have to transfer quarterback from Missouri, he’s a dual threat guy, and they like to run the ball with a very talented running back who’s on the Reese’s Bowl watch list, they want to chew up the clock and run the ball, so yeah it will be a great challenge for us.”

Kick-off for the Cowboys game against Alcorn is set for 6:00 PM this Saturday as the Cowboys will look to try to get their first win of the 2023 season.