Excitement builds with strong play in opener

I am excited!

I thought our diaper dandies played a tremendous football game Saturday at Division I-A Eastern Michigan, even though we fell short 16-12, and we have regional rival Southern Illinois at Houck Stadium this Saturday night in what should be an exciting and fun football game.

I sincerely hope the students and community will get behind this football team. I think you will have fun watching this team grow. It is sort of like building a new house. You like to go by every day and see the progress that has been made. This season, game by game, and for the next three seasons you will be able to see our team grow.

We have a solid foundation and now we just have to see how fast we can get the walls up and begin the finishing. With the students and community behind us, we can be successful this season.

We are very young, with 18 players who played their first collegiate game Saturday, and we'll make some mistakes, but our team is talented, exciting and plays very hard. They want to win this season and, with a strong backing from the community, we can start to see those walls go up.

Our team didn't go to Eastern Michigan to put in a good showing. They went to win and almost got the job done. I feel great about how our kids played. They played hard all the way to the end and played well. The game was ours to win, but Eastern Michigan made some big plays down the stretch and pulled it out.

I didn't think they overpowered us in the fourth quarter, like a lot of teams did last year. They just made the plays they needed to and we had some mistakes that cost a chance for a huge upset win.

Our performance at Eastern Michigan leaves me very encouraged. The only negative is that we were in a position to win but didn't get the job done. We have to learn how to get over the hump. Some players will have to make a play that wins us a game like Eastern Michigan and we will develop the ability to win a lot of games. You have to be able to make plays.

We have some exciting players. Curtis Cooper did a great job running the football with 26 carries for 129 yards. Our two new receivers, Adrian Sanders and Willie Ponder, both had big games, and redshirt freshman quarterback Jeromy McDowell played very, very well.

McDowell made a lot of checks at the line of scrimmage and made good decisions throughout the game. He is the leader of our offensive unit.

We are dramatically improved on defense. Corey Mathis was the OVC Defensive Player of the Week after recording three tackles for loss. All our linebackers played well, our defensive line was very physical and our secondary was solid.

Dimitri Patterson, a true freshman who is a special player, had an interception. I told our players after the game, though, that we had our hands on eight passes but got only one interception. We need to create more turnovers.

Saturday's game will be the opener for SIU. The Salukis have a new coaching staff in place so we don't really know what to expect. We will have to make adjustments as we go. How well we do that will determine the outcome of the game.

It should be a great game. I hope you will be there to cheer us on.

I am excited!

Tim Billings is the head football coach at Southeast Missouri State University.