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Gridiron Lowdown 9/15/16

The Florida Tech Panthers practice started a little bit ahead of schedule on Thursday, as Coach Steve Englehart had the guys doing some extra work.

“Practice didn’t start off real well, he said. “We had some discipline issues with guys not taking care of the locker room, the way they should. We got that problem solved this morning at the start of practice and I thought the rest of the practice went pretty well.”

These are guys that care about their teammates and care about the coach, as there were a few players, during the extra work, reminding the team that they did this to themselves. It certainly shows that they understood the mistakes that were made.

Coach has said in the past that Thursday is more of a mental day than a physical one. A chance to run through things and make sure they are on the same page. This practice followed that path, but Englehart said that the team had a good week of practice overall.

“Tuesday we had some rain issues and lightning that we had to get off the field, so we had to come back in the afternoon and finish it up,” he said. “I thought Wednesday’s practice was really good, a full padded practice, and got after it pretty good and I thought the energy was good.”

Coming off the 41-0 win over Mississippi College on Saturday, the team now looks to keep their good fortune going, as they travel to Rome, GA to take on Gulf South Conference foe Shorter. Coach Englehart talked about the process of going from one game to the next.

“We take each game like it’s a new challenge,” he said. “I don’t know how much momentum from a past game carries over. Momentum is from play to play and from series to series. I’m not sure it carries week-to-week because the opponent is different opponent, situation, and environment.”

Englehart addressed the teams’ injury situation, going into this week’s game. “Matt Nelson, our starting left tackle is going to be out at least three weeks, he had a meniscus injury and had surgery yesterday.”

“Hopefully we stay healthy throughout the course of the next several weeks and throughout the season. We’re not bad right now, we had the injuries against Newberry to the wide receiver core, but other than that we’re fairly healthy and we get Nate McDowell (Sr. DB) back this week, who we haven’t had the first two weeks, which will help us on defense.”

Saturday’s game against Shorter kicks off at 7:00 p.m. Jerry Durney and Paul Van Scott will call a radio broadcast of the game, which will be available on WFIT 89.5 FM, at WFIT.org, and through the free TuneIn Radio app.