By Matt Sugam

If there’s only one thing Kyle Flood could hammer home to his team following their 24-12 win at Tulane, it would be to cut back on the penalties.

Pleased with his teams overall perfomrance, the first-year head coach would like to see the yellow hankie thrown a little less on his squad.

“There were too many penalties,” Flood said today on a conference call with reporters. “We’ll work on that this week as we go through some of them I need to discuss and some of them you’re not going to be able to discuss.”

One of the one’s he probably won’t be able to discuss is getting a penality for a late hit while protecting your running back.

“There was a late hit on one of the plays that I thought was an aggressive penalties and I don’t want to coach the team not to be aggressive, and not to push piles and things like that,” Flood said. “We want the pile going forward. We’re not going to allow people to bend our running back backwards, so I’m willing to live with a couple of those.

And some of the other things, like the holding, a couple of DPIs [defensive pass interference], we got to get a little bit better.”

So the Scarlet Knights will look to cut back on the nine penalties they had against Tulane as they prepare for Howard. In turn, Flood would expect to see a more productive offense.

“I think we had some drives that got stalled a little bit by penalties, so to me the biggest improvement we’re going to make on offense is clean up some of these penalties,” Flood said.

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