Pelini: YSU players must embrace change

Penguins have

lost three straight

By STEVE WILAJ

sports@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

With a play made here or another made there, head coach Bo Pelini realizes the Youngstown State Penguins — losers of three straight — could be sitting pretty.

See, of YSU’s four losses this season, one is by eight points, another is by two points and last week’s came by seven points in overtime at Southern Illinois. But as the first-year coach warned Tuesday at his weekly press conference, don’t let those near-misses fool you.

“Really, the reality of where we’d be [with wins] wouldn’t be much different than where we are right now,” said Pelini, whose Penguins are 3-4 overall and 1-3 in the Missouri Valley Football Conference (ninth out of 10 teams). “We’d feel better about it. But I guarantee there would still be things — if our record was different — that we need to change and need to get better at as we go forward.”

So goes YSU in its first season under Pelini. After starting 3-1, the Penguins are in a rough patch as they prepare for Saturday’s 2 p.m. contest at Western Illinois (4-3, 3-1).

All along, Pelini has spoken of the process of changing the program’s culture from the previous five-year regime of former head coach Eric Wolford. Seven games in and a few difficult losses later, it’s evident that process is still ongoing.

“Some things have to change and guys have to embrace the change,” Pelini said. “Things are gonna be different when you have a new coaching staff and new type of culture coming in. You have to embrace it, listen to the message and put it to work.”

Pelini spoke about the changing-culture process for approximately 15 of the 20 minutes that he answered questions. While the topic ranged pretty wide, here’s a good indication of Pelini’s main message about a YSU football program that — from the outside looking in — appears to be underperforming.

“It’s a work in progress,” he said. “It’s my job and the staff’s job to improve the level of consistency, improve the culture, the toughness, the physicality, the effort — all the things and details of what’s going to allow us to be good, not just over the next four weeks, but over a long period of time.”

Basically, the former University of Nebraska coach believes all those characteristics lacked under Wolford, whose YSU teams never made the playoffs. And currently, the majority of the Penguins roster still consists of Wolford-recruited players.

In turn, Pelini and his staff have had their work cut out for them — although he’s positive YSU is heading in the right direction despite its three-game skid.

“We’re not near where we want to be yet,” Pelini said. “When you lose a couple football games, people say, ‘OK, you’ve taken a step back.’ No. We’ve been inconsistent.

“The culture and standards we’re trying to live by, we have not lived up to that yet. I think there has been progress in some areas and not enough progress in other areas. We’re still trying to find some right combinations in some areas and people that are going to give us the best chance to win football games.”

Over the next four weeks of a 2015 YSU campaign that will likely finish at regular-season’s end, Pelini is looking for a number of key things from his players, including: better and more-consistent effort, more efficient practices, better attention to detail and improved discipline.

They’re all important ingredients in Pelini’s recipe to change the program’s culture.

“We have to fix us,” he said.