No matter how you try to sugarcoat it, things haven't gone well for head coach Garrick McGee and his Blazer football team. Eight games into the season, and the team is still making plenty of mistakes. The problems seem particularly big on the defensive side of the ball.

"We had a meeting with myself and our defensive players [Sunday]," McGee said in his weekly news conference Monday, "and we just watched what's happening on the field. I think the issues can be fixed.

"When you're coaching football at this level, when there are technique flaws, or scheme flaws, they're supposed to get fixed," he added. "When you're coaching at the Division I-A level, you should be able to fix them, and I think they can be fixed."

One thing the team must learn, he added, was to play all four quarters of the game. "The question is how do we become mentally tough enough to overcome the ups and downs of a 60-minute football game," McGee said. "That's something you have to train and develop by the way that you practice, by the way that you meet their intensity, by understanding and putting your kids in situations on the practice field where they're going to fail or where they're going to succeed and to understand how they respond to it."

Senior linebacker Marvin Burdette echoed the thought. "We still have a lot to play for," Burdette said. "There are guys on our team that have yet to become fully mature. We have to show them that, regardless of how life works out, you have to keep going."

Burdette has been a rare bright spot on the team, getting a career-high 24 tackles in the last game. He plans to approach the rest of the games with the same type of intensity. "I'm still going to give the same effort in practice," he said. "I want to leave this place knowing that I helped some young guys change their mindset about this program."

Wide receiver Jackie Williams, another bright spot on the team, has a similar attitude. "We are going to (work) harder than we did last week," Williams said. "We're going to keep fighting because there are still games to be played. We are going to continue to correct our mistakes from the previous week so we can get a win."

The question remains, though, as to why the team is still making so many mistakes. But McGee says he won't change his approach to the game. "We're not going to win six games and go to a bowl game," he said, "but the approach we take won't change, and it never will.

"Our approach is that we want to develop one day at a time, and become a better individual first, better unit second, better football team, better football program. We do everything we can possibly do on a daily basis to move closer toward that, and that's not going to change. "


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