The college football season has kicked off, and the University at Albany has a tall order in its opener on Saturday.
The Great Danes are heading to Waco, Texas to face No. 10 Baylor, the reigning Big 12 champion, before a home game against Colonial Athletic Association foe New Hampshire Sept. 10.
Head coach Greg Gattuso is entering his ninth season and is looking to bring UAlbany back to the FCS playoffs for the first time since 2019. He spoke with WAMC's Ian Pickus about the matchup against the Bears and the new season.
You have spent your whole life in football. How do you get ready for a new season now?
Good question. No one's asked me that one. It doesn't change a lot for me. You know, as a head football coach, there's a lot of things going on with traveling, moving a team, moving equipment, everything. We have a lot of people working really hard to get our football team to Waco and set up a practice. So you know, busy, I'd say very busy and trying to squeeze as much football in with all the administrative stuff as I can. So it kind of gets on your fast. No time to be nervous. I'll probably be a little nervous Friday night. But other than that, I mean, we're just working and grinding and trying to get ready for the game.
With everything college sports and college football has gone through in the past few years, with COVID moving the season to the spring, playing a shortened spring season, all of that now seeming to be in the rearview mirror, does it make your job any easier?
Yeah, I mean, there was so many issues and really just the best thing to do is forget about it and move on. And so we feel normal. And we're moving forward. We've had a great year of training. We've had a great summer. We feel like we have a good preseason camp. And we got a group of kids on the team that are excited about going out and playing Baylor. So you know, life is good. We just want to get going and get this thing started and have a great football season.
Well, Baylor won the Sugar Bowl last year, and they're coming off their best season ever more or less. Why schedule Baylor? What do you hope to get out of the game?
Well, you know, when you're at FCS level, you're always going to play some of these games when you play up to the FBS level. And in this case, we're playing a Power Five BCS national championship contender, which is a tall order for us. But you know, obviously, there's, there's some money at it. But I think the more important thing is, our kids just love the challenge. They get to go out and play in a great stadium against a top 10 football team. It's never been done in Albany before in football. And I think, you know, this team is kind of breaking a barrier here to go play this type of football game. So we just want to put our best foot forward, go out there and play our best we can and if we can get this game in the second half and keep it as close as we can, and maybe we have a shot to win at the end, which would be a massive upset. But that's the plan right now, we just have to try to execute it.
When you do play a team like this, and you've had some on your schedule in years past before, do you coach differently? Do you game-plan differently just knowing it's a different type of opponent?
No, not really. I mean, we operate: it's all about us and how we react and do the things that we're supposed to do. I think the danger in these games is a lot of times we found specially in when we played Pitt and some teams like this in the past was just being a little bit not as focused on the actual game, as far as the bigger stage. And I think we've really worked hard to get our kids to understand this is a football game. We have to execute, we have to do our jobs. You don't have to have Superman effort. You just have to do your job every play. And I think we've got our message through, I think. We've had a good practice. We have a lot of progress with our team with a lot of new players and starters and things like that. But we're excited about going out and expecting that we're going to play a good football game.
Well, you mentioned the new faces. You had four quarterbacks competing for that role during training camp. What's your game plan for Baylor and then looking forward after that?
I think, you know, at the end of the day for guys was hard to do. But the kids worked hard in it. We made it as fair as we could and we felt like going into this game that Reese Poffenbarger is a little bit in the front, but I really never have settled on a starting quarterback until they get out there and play some games and win some games. So you know, as far as I know, this is still open competition. Reese is going to start this week. We have expectations of Joey Carino and Tyler Szalkowski and we'll see how it goes. I think my goal would be, hopefully as soon as possible, but the latest by the off week, we would have a guy that we feel is the number one guy. So that's still open in my mind. And we want to get out in the field and see how our guys perform.
Last year, the team went 2-9 but started to turn things around toward the end of the season. Are you putting any extra focus this year on getting off to a better start?
Oh yeah, we always, you know, want to get off to a great start of the year. And it's all about commitment to what we're trying to do. And I think, you know, we lost a lot of close games last year. You know, we opened at No.1 North Dakota State, we played a top 25 Rhode Island team in week two. We played Syracuse in week three, our fourth game was against No. 8 Delaware. It was just a rough opening, and we lost close games. And I think when you look at us in ‘19 and you look at us in ‘21 the difference is we won the close games. So that's discipline, that's coaching, that's on us as coaches, and I think we've done some things to make ourselves better. You know, I feel like we have a good football team right now. We lost some good players with the transfer portal. I feel like we replaced them plus more on the plus side to help our depth and our team. I think we've greatly strengthened our kicking game. Signing Tyler Pastula, who was the first team CAA punter last year, is gonna go a long way to making our kicking game better. And I think that some adjustments we made are paying dividends right now. So we're confident, we're excited. And I think regardless of the first game, we're looking forward to having a great season.
I know you don't put a lot of stock into preseason polls. The preseason coaches’ poll had UAlbany picked second to last. What do you think of the rest of the conference this year? And do you think that poll got it wrong?
You know, the, the poll 99% of time is wrong. In our league, every year, they pick someone at 12th or next to last that ends up in the top part of the conference. It's just too close to call in our league. You know, it's every year we sit down to vote on that, I laugh, it's just such a futile thing to try to do. But ’19 we were picked to finish last, we ended up second. You know last year, Rhode Island was picked last and finished fourth. It's just the way it works in our league, so we're not worried about it. We know what we have here. We know the type of team we have. We feel really confident with our coaching staff and the support we have here at Albany and I'm just really excited about getting on the field and proving it this year that we're the ‘19 version much more than we were the ‘21 version.
