What Middle Tennessee Coach Rick Stockstill Said About Facing Alabama

The Mustangs will open the 2023 college football season by visiting the Crimson Tide at Bryant-Denny Stadium.

While Alabama Crimson Tide coach Nick Saban was holding his Monday press conference, Rick Stockstill was doing the same at Middle Tennessee. Here’s what he told reporters:

“It's game week and fired up. In our world it's the greatest week of the year, and, you know I'm sure every coach every player in the country saying that now. But we're excited about it we've had a really, really good offseason going all the way back to January, then through spring practice this summer, and then camp. I like where we're at right now. I like our team. It's a very, very committed an competitive team and so I'm excited about these guys and I'm looking forward to watching them play obviously. We've got a tremendous challenge and a tremendous opportunity this week with Alabama, one of the best teams in the country. They lose two games last year by a total of four points and everybody thinks that, you know, the sky is falling down there. It’s a really, really talented team. We've got to play well. We expect to play well and[are] just looking forward to getting down there and starting this season off. They have a lot of good players, but we got a lot of good players too and I believe in our team. We've got to play well anytime you play a team like Alabama, a top two, three, team in the country. You’ve got to play well. You can't give him anything. You’ve got to make the earn everything they get, then we've got to play really well. So that's our expectation, and we'll go down there and play and I expect us to play good. I expect us to, there's never any question that we’ll play hard. I know we'll play hard, but I expect this to go down there and play well this weekend. So I’m looking forward to the to this opportunity.”

Q: Alabama's got two new coordinators this year, one on offense one on defense. How do you go about preparing for what could be some new looks from a team when you don't have any tape on them for Week 1?

I think anytime you look at Alabama, when they've had coordinator changes, schematically they haven't changed that much. You know Kevin Steele the defensive coordinator this is his third time with Coach Saban. At Alabama he was at Miami last year as the defensive coordinator and what they did in Miami, there's some carryover there's some similarity to what you know he had done in Alabama, while he was there. So yeah, we're preparing for Alabama and then same thing offensively, coming from Notre Dame, Tommy [Rees] coming from Notre Dame, I don't foresee them changing drastically. I know they want to run the ball better than what they did last year, or maybe a little bit more effectively than what they did last year, so you play that into it.

They got the quarterback dilemma a little bit who is gonna be, but you know whoever they put out there is gonna be a talented player. We've got enough, you know, tape we've watched a little bit of Notre Dame, we've watched a little bit of Miami, we've watched a lot of Alabama.

Q: Can you talk about the quarterback situation at Alabama, and do you expect multiple quarterbacks? How does that affect how you prepare for them?

I don't know what to expect. Just putting myself in those shoes. They may want to play multiple guys. They redshirted a couple guys last year they got a transfer in from Notre Dame so maybe they want to play multiple guys, I don't know. It’s not my team. We'll prepare, we've watched a little bit of all those guys, and we'll prepare for whoever comes out there and that's all you can do. You can't you can't worry about who they're going to play or what they're going to do. [We’ll] control what we can control, that's all we can do.

Whoever goes out there, schematically I don't think it's gonna be a drastic change from Ty Simpson to this guy, to the other guy, whoever is going to be. So go out there and do our job, do it the best that we can do it, and hopefully that's good enough.

Q: Your quarterback situation, you've come out of spring this year pretty much knowing who your guy was going to be. Can you talk a little bit about Nick Vattiato's story and having been a bowl MVP two years ago to redshirting last year? It's kind of unique.

Yeah, and I'm not saying this because Nick's here, but I love Nick. I respect Nick. I respect the heck, out of him all the way back to recruiting him in high school when he had to go through part of the Covid deal where you know he lost his season but wanted to play so he went to another place so he could play. And then coming here sight unseen he wasn't able to visit here. Just the relationship that we developed is special to me. And then coming in as a freshman you know he wasn't ready at that, you know, when he first got here, and not many of them are, so we were playing, [there] was the redshirting, and then we had one quarterback leave, and then Chase [Cunningham] got hurt. Ultimately, we thought Nick gave us the best chance to win and he proved that, was accurate. So in this day and time it's hard for guys not to be selfish. You don't play at all, you're on the scout team, you don't play at all for seven weeks, seven games, and then here comes coach, ‘Hey you want to give up your redshirt year in the middle of a game?’ He didn't blink an eye and I respect guys like that. So he played those five games his true freshman year and I told him, I said, ‘You know the next year, compete for the job, if you're the guy, you'll be it, and if not try to get your redshirt year back.’ Chase had a great year and Nick came in a couple games last year when Chase went down, but Chase is a great. I mean Nick is a great teammate. He's a great, great player. He’s fun to coach. He works extremely hard and you know now he's earned this opportunity to lead this team out of the tunnel the first game and [I] just have a lot of respect for him, and admiration for him, and in what he's done in a short period of time here. He's played seven games, something like that, six games, whatever it is, and not even complete games, so I'm very, very confident in Nick and very confident he's going to have a heck of a year this year.

Q: You've coached down at Alabama in 2015 with the blue Raiders, you have a lot of coaches on staff who played in that game. What are you all telling the team this year about to prepare for that environment specifically?

We'll meet tomorrow. I didn't talk about it one time during camp. They know who we play. We'll talk a little bit about it, but all that stuff, we've been in big stadiums, we've been in loud stadiums, played music loud the other day in practice during some team stuff just so the offense could get acclimated a little bit to some crowd noise. But I didn't say, ‘Hey Nick, this is what it's going to be like on Saturday. Just played it. I don't make a big deal out of that kind of stuff. [Coaches] Brent [Stockstill], Maurquice [Shakir] and Shane [Tucker] and those guys have played down there and all that stuff. Same thing as last year in Miami. Same thing at Syracuse. Same thing in Missouri, all that kind of stuff. We just [need to] down there and roll up our sleeves, and go to work, and fight our guts out for 60 minutes.

Q: The first game isn't always you know the best measuring stick especially guests with an opponent like Alabama, but after all the work you guys have put in during camp is there something specific that you're hoping to take away from this opening week?

Yeah, you know, I think that's the big thing is you just want to go out and play as clean a game as you can. You always look at first games most of the time people lose the game, they don't get beat in first games, because of mistakes that they make whether it be in the kicking game, or give up big plays on defense, or you turn the ball over on offense. So to go down there and play a clean game, our objective is to win this game, but to do that we've got to play clean we've got to play smart. We can't do things to beat ourselves and with like I said penalties, turnovers, missed tackles, giving up big plays, things in the kicking game that you know tend to show up a little bit more in first games.

Q: With new rules in in effect this year what do you did you see in any games over the weekend and how any of the timing rules and things like that might have an effect now?

I'm on the Rules Committee so I've got a pretty good understanding of everything. They've said that just keeping the clock running after the first down after first downs, other than the last two minutes of the second and fourth quarters, they're talking about taking anywhere from five to seven plays out of a game. When you watch a game on TV you know you're not sitting there ‘That's 58, that's 59 [plays].’ So it's hard to see. The one thing that came up, you can't call back-to-back timeouts. I believe it was UTEP, they called a timeout then they had a substitution deal right after the timeout where the you know they didn't get the play off and they called another time out. Can't do it. So it was a five-yard penalty. I don't think to the normal person, and the normal eye, the naked eye, you're going to sit there and say, ‘Yeah that was a really, really fast game.’ I think it's just going to take people getting used to that clock not stopping.

Q: You were talking about your quarterback earlier and I was just curious your thoughts on protecting him against knowing kind of what Alabama's defensive scheme is like and how they're able to rush the pass keeping your quarterback upright:

I don't have any issues any doubts that that Nick will execute our offense. Our offensive line has done a really good job this camp. We've done a good job and the thing you know is they're talented. They're gonna come out with pressures and all that kind of stuff. We've just got to be able to communicate and pick them up and then I think the big thing is just once you get outside the pocket understand and know, and this doesn't matter if you're playing Alabama or you know the Georgetown High School Wampus cats (laughter in room). It doesn't matter once you get outside the pocket, understand you know when the play is over, and get down. Live for the next down. But I don't have any doubts that our line will do a good job, our backs will do a good job, Nick will get us in the right protection and he'll sit back here like a man and compete as quarterback.

You're standing there, you're standing upright, and you got another six five 300-pound man coming barreling right down at you and you got to sit there in the pocket, and you got to sit there and make the throw and take it on the chin sometimes. That’s part of being a quarterback. And Nick's got that toughness, so we'll do a good job, hopefully we do a good job protecting him.