CCU not worried about facing ranked Eastern Kentucky

The Coastal Carolina Chanticleers (2-0) will be taking on the 20th ranked, Eastern Kentucky Colonels (1-1) this Saturday at Brooks Stadium. This will be Coastal’s toughest test yet, playing their first ranked team of the young season, but its business as usual for the Chants.

During Coach Moglia’s mid-week press conference he expressed his team’s disinterest in rankings, “If we spend 10 minutes on the fact that they’re ranked, that’s 10 minutes that comes away from our preparation. That’s a bad allocation of our time. It doesn’t come up; it hasn’t come up once in anything that we do—there is nothing we can do about it.”

Coming off a thrilling overtime victory last week versus the Furman Paladins, the Chanticleer defense will look to redeem them-selves after allowing scores on their last five positions. Even though this was a concerning display of defense in the final drives, Coach Moglia acknowledged that this was the same defense that only allowed one touchdown in the previous seven quarters.

Eastern Kentucky's biggest weapon on offense is their red-shirt senior running back, Matt Denham. Denham is on the Walter Payton Award Watch List for this season, after averaging 130.8-yards rushing per game last year. Last week versus Morehead State, Denham rushed for 166-yards and added on one touchdown.

Aramis Hillary and Matt Hazel will be looking to keep their hot start of the season going after hooking up ten times for 185-yards and two touchdowns in the first two games.

Hillary will try to make it a hat trick in terms of career days after making it back-to-back career games through the air with 274-yards and 292-yards, respectively, versus NC A&T and Furman.

Versus the Paladins last week, the special teams played a big role in the victory by winning their own battles. The special teams will look to continue their success versus the Colonels this week but will certainly have their hands full. Eastern Kentucky has shown 12 different looks on punting alone in their first two games. Coach Moglia talked about the unorthodox approach EKU takes on special teams, “It creates headaches, it creates problems. So you can approach that a couple different ways. You can have multiple answers for multiple things, the problem with that is, you are going to have difficulties executing multiple answers. Or you can have a couple answers that you can execute, that are sound against the different things they do.”

Brooks Stadium is sure to be packed for the second home game of the year as this marks the annual Family Weekend game at Coastal Carolina. Game time is set for 6:00 PM.

Written by, Tom Michienzi. Tom is a producer for ESPN Radio 100.3 'The Team' and the beat report for Coastal Carolina Football for ESPN 100.3 and TheDigitel Myrtle Beach. You can follow Tom on Twitter @Tmichienzi18 or for questions call 774-254-4165.

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