UND Football Focusing On Themselves As Game One Approaches

Fighting Hawks Ready for Drake Week One

GRAND FORKS, N.D — North Dakota football is preparing for their season opener Saturday. The Fighting Hawks take on a Drake team who has a new head coach and a new quarterback in 2019.

The Bulldogs took the Big 12’s Iowa State to the wire last season only losing by a margin of three points in the final week of the season. UND has some kinks to work out themselves. It’ll be the first time the Hawks show their new offense under offensive coordinator Danny Freund. Coach Bubba Schweigert says his team is ready to shake the rust off and focusing on the task at hand with week  one here.

“There’s always going to be first game jitters. Those things were trying to work out. All those wrinkles,” Schweigert said. “The more you can prepare and the better you can prepare, you can settle in a bit quicker. On Saturday, we’ll see if you can get some three and outs that’ll help you. If you can hang on to the ball and drive the ball, that’ll really help your football team. That’s the plan. We want to take care of the football, drive the football and be sharp on defense.”

I’ve played three years and I still get the jitters every time. Its just about taking a deep breath and relaxing,” quarterback Nate Ketteringham said. “Helping the younger guys and ultimately knowing that the game is way slower for the older guys. Using that to our advantage.”

“Every day is day by day. Just focus on today’s workouts. Today’s meetings. You can’t think focus on week two, week 11, playoffs, anything like that,” defensive end Mason Bennett said. “We have to keep it simple. We have to keep it simple here and that’s our main goal.”

Drake is one of two teams in the first six weeks of the season the Fighting Hawks will face who are not ranked in the preseason STATS FCS poll.