Coach, we're finally getting somewhere. There is a lot of obvious to your Part II, but this is probably your best quote:
Conversely, defensively, we have to get better on third down. We were bad there. I thought at times we did a really nice job of stopping the run, really in the last part of the year. We have to tackle better … and we have to do more tackling drills and more competition against each other where we're tackling each other. We'd started doing that late in the year and we got better. We didn't do it early, because we didn't have as many people with quarantining issues, and, honestly, I was still figuring out how much of that we could do with COVID-19 so we wouldn't have contact tracing issues. "I hope we [have spring practice]. Our players need it from an improvement standpoint, and they need it just for trying to get back to as much of a normal way of living as we can."
Frankly, its about controlling line of scrimmage, time of possession, and have high conversions of 3rd downs to keep ahead of chains. And, comment on better tackling and pressure is good. We need quick tackles and good corners and safeties in the secondary to not get burned like we too often have. Quick scoring in your other comments could be good and bad. Score too quick, defense is out there too much and tends to be "leaky" resulting in 55-51 type of barnburner games that's a roll of dice to win. Score too little, and it becomes a long afternoon like the first Troy game, or even worse how we fared against Army with zero. I'm fine with only scoring 22 points a game if we can hold opponents to an average of 17 or fewer consistently; doesn't always have to be an big offensive play to be a productive one...in CUSA just being solid and consistent can be good enough to win championships, which we haven't had an outright one in a while. Just watch some of Bill Clark's teams at UAB and never forget to have 11 on the field and not 12 and maybe we just might get to a C-USA Championship game again.
Championships...that is where we need to be. Let me make myself clear coach, it's championships. Okay?