Jaden Harris: Going through tempo in practice 100 times makes it that much easier

Jaden Harris has been one of the breakout players of the defense, as he is playing fast and consistently finding himself around the ball. He met with reporters to discuss the USF game and his progress:

On USF’s offense: They have a great team and a great scheme. What makes it less difficult are the people up top, Coach Guidry and Coach Jackson, coming up with a great game plan for us. Those guys make our jobs easy by helping us understand the scheme, understand their strengths. That makes it a lot easier, just trusting the game plan and practicing it all week.

On OJ Frederique: I’ve never really seen a freshman come in and be this mature and play as well as he did. I could have predicted it after the first couple of days of camp, just seeing the way he competed and how consistent he was. That’s one of the best things about him is he’s consistent. Usually with young guys, they’ll have a good day and then have a day where they’re not at their best. But with him, you get the same guy every day. That’s the great thing about him.

His man-to-man coverage [stands out]. He doesn’t panic at all, looks back for the ball, finds the ball. He just has a natural ability to play man-to-man. I love playing with a corner like that. It’s easy to just tell them, lock on that man, have a nice day, and I can go find other work.

On Byrum Brown: He’s a great quarterback. Definitely has a great skill set. He is a dual-threat quarterback, so can throw it in the air, can run with his feet. This is a great opportunity to play against a great team.

On the team’s mindset through three games: Just worry about what’s in front of us, take every practice day-by-day, don’t listen to the outside noise, don’t worry about what other people think, but just worry about what we have to do.

We had times where we were down during camp, and we just feel like we’re all we got in the back end. It’s not listening to the noise, not listening to anything, the good or the bad. We just worry about what we have in our group, in our secondary, and what we have in our coaches and our staff and our family here. That’s the best thing we do, just worry about what we have to do and our objective.

On preparing for USF’s tempo: Going through it in practice 100 times, it makes it that much easier. Our coaches do a great job of finding tendencies and things that might give us trouble. We practice that over and over and over again. So it feels normal when Saturday comes. We have a a great coaching staff upstairs that puts together great game plans for us to make us feel like there’s nothing that we’ve never seen before.