FSU Football: Takeaways from Willie Taggart’s media scrum for Louisville

FSU football head coach Willie Taggart spoke withe media prior to Thursday morning’s practice and spoke about preparation for Louisville.

FSU football travels to Louisville this week looking to avenge losses from the past two years, including an absolute destruction in 2016.

A lot of players from the FSU team that experienced that loss are no longer here, but a few like Deondre Francois, Jacques Patrick, DeMarcus Christmas and Brian Burns remain.

Willie Taggart spoke with the media Thursday on a variety of topics from how practice this week has gone to how to defend both of Louisville’s quarterbacks.

The entire video can be seen below but there’s one prevailing theme to take away.

Thoughts

I’m going to paraphrase but the prevailing theme seems to be for these players to stop trying to play “hero ball” and just execute their assignment.

FSU defensive coordinator Harlon Barnett preached the same thing in his media scrum Wednesday. The coaches want these players to execute their one assignment on any given play.

The key to it is executing it as a unit though and that hasn’t been happening consistently enough. Remember the car engine analogy I like to use?

There are several parts to a car engine with every part performing a specific duty for that engine to operate at optimum levels.

If the O2 sensors fail you’re going to get poor gas mileage so on and so on. The running backs have to be patient and hit the correct holes when they’re there.

Deondre Francois has to make the correct reads at the line of scrimmage and on read option plays. The offensive line has to block the guy they are assigned to block and wide receivers must block and run the correct routes.

I know it seems basic, but success in football is doing all those little things on EVERY play. That’s what separates the best teams from the others(along with talent of course which FSU has plenty of at most positions).

There were more glimpses of the consistency forming against Northern Illinois but it still has ways to go before this team can compete for titles.

However, after the first three games all we wanted to see was some type of progress being made and that happened against Northern Illinois.

Now we need to see it again Saturday against Louisville.