Rusty Wright and his University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football team have watched their share of video this week in preparation for Thursday night’s season opener against Eastern Illinois.
Not a great deal of that footage has featured the Panthers, however, and for good reason. Like the Mocs, Eastern Illinois has a new coaching staff with new schemes and numerous new starters. And like Wright, the Panthers’ Adam Cushing is making his debut as a head coach.
In other words, overloading on game video from the 2018 season would be a fairly big waste of time.
“They have a new head coach and offensive coordinator, so we’re not real sure what we’re going to see,” said Wright, the former UTC player and assistant hired last December. “They have a new defensive coordinator, and we have an idea of what they will do, but not 100% certain on that.
“That’s one of the challenges moving forward. In the grand scheme of things, you can practice against a certain thing all week and they come out with a completely different thing. You still have to block them. You still have to tackle them. It doesn’t matter what they do, football is football when it’s all said and done.”