HELENA — Coming off No. 25 Carroll College's home-opening loss to No. 11 Montana Tech and heading into Carroll's Week 3 bye, 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: Coming off a 30-19 loss to Tech, what didn't go well for you guys in that game? What led to that result?
Troy Purcell: Yeah, you know, it's all phases. They did a great job running that football. There's a punt that got blocked where we didn't block a punt. There's, you know, all these just critical times in critical situations. And again, it's about six or seven plays during a game. You can go back and say, if those six plays were different, then this game would be different. But you don't know when the six plays are. And so, hats off to Montana Tech. They ended up coming up here and getting a win.
MTN Sports: Obviously, the first loss of the season for you guys comes in the home opener. What do you learn about a team in how they respond to a loss like that?
Troy Purcell: That's a great question. So that's the preaching — anybody's going to get punched in the face, you know what I mean? But how are you going to respond? How are you going to get back up? How are you going to increase your practice, productivity, and continue to improve? And those teams that continue to improve usually end up on top at the end.
MTN Sports: Speaking about the offense, how do you use this bye week to improve on that side of the ball? (You) scored 19 against Tech, 20 against MSU-Northern. So how do you continue to improve on that side of the ball?
Troy Purcell: Oh, the mental mistakes, the mistakes that cost you. You know, we had a rub penalty, then a holding call, then a this, then a that. So again, the mental stuff — and just take care of yourself (and you’ll) usually have pretty good results in football games. It's when you're making those mental mistakes — we had the rub, they called it a rub and it was two guys ran into each other. Well, you get the ball at the 40 going in, or you get the ball on the 11 coming out and it's third down. So, man, what a difference that makes in a football game with those mental mistakes. You just can't have it.
