Desormeaux – We Only Get To Play 12 Games, We’ll Be Ready

With expected high temperatures this weekend, the Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns announced last weekend, they are moving the kickoff back one hour for their season opener against Northwestern State on Saturday, September 2nd.  Instead of 6:30P, kickoff is now scheduled for 7:30P.

During Mike Desormeaux's Monday press conference, the Ragin' Cajuns Head Coach commented they only get to play 12 times a year and have to be ready whenever they say go.

MIKE DESORMEAUX - TEAM WILL BE READY

I talk about it all of the time, playing football, you only get 12 opportunities. And you only get six home games. So it doesn't matter if it’s playing in the parking lot, at 8:00 in the morning, you’ve got to be ready to go play.   Some of these other sports, they're fortunate. They get to play 30,40, 50, 60 games a year and so they have a lot of those opportunities.

For us, you get 12 that are guaranteed to you as a team and you only get six of them at home.  So, we’ve just got to just roll with the punches and get ready to go and go play and go play well.  

So to me, it's not a big deal. We'll adjust our schedule. Our kids will be excited about it. You know, hopefully that means that there's a lot more people in the stands and they're more ready for the season and more excited about the kickoff and all those things.  But at the end of the day, it's about the teams between the white lines and our guys will be ready to play no matter what time.

MIKE DESORMEAUX - APPRECIATES DR. MAGGARD'S LEADERSHIP

I'll say this, Dr. Maggard has been incredible in a lot of ways.  But decisions like that? He always reaches out to me first and always “Hey, look, this what I'm thinking about doing. What are your thoughts?”

He's a phenomenal leader and he's the kind of person that doesn’t just make decisions and you find out after.  The only way it really affects us is, you just push some things back a little bit. It's not a big deal.  

The bottom line is this if he thinks that that's the best scenario for our fans experience, kind of the way that he termed it to me, I'm all about it. I mean, our kids, they got to be ready to play no matter what time it is.