Kiffin doubts bye hurt momentum

Owls are eyeing their first winning season since 2008.

BOCA RATON — Sitting in his hometown of Tampa while visiting his family during the Owls’ bye week, Florida Atlantic junior linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair had a strange feeling when he woke up Saturday and remembered there was no game that night.

“It felt like I was off for forever,” said Al-Shaair. “I’m used to being here every single day.”

FAU’s bye week followed the team’s second straight win — just its second in-season win streak since the start of 2014 — a 58-28 victory over Old Dominion in which the Owls set a program record for most points scored.

FAU coach Lane Kiffin expressed concern leading up to the bye that his team could lose the momentum that has it eyeing its first winning season since 2008. With the bye week now officially in the past, Kiffin acknowledged he felt more optimistic after seeing how his team responded.

“I think we maximized the time, gave our players a decent amount of time off,” Kiffin said. “I would’ve preferred to keep playing. I think that we weren’t really that banged up and we’d been playing our best football of the year the last couple weeks.”

Many of the team’s assistant coaches hit the road during the bye for recruiting, something Kiffin hopes will “help us in the future.”

While the players do take pride in hitting the field on Saturdays, the time off provided the student-athletes time to catch up on classwork or get some extra rest. After missing all of last season with a broken hip following a scooter accident, offensive tackle Reggie Bain joked he felt “way better than this time last year.”

“I was actually happy (for the bye week) because I slept in a little bit more,” Bain said. “I came, got some treatment, got my body right in the cold tub . ... We worked on technique, but we didn’t, like, hammer ourselves to where we came back worse.”

Kiffin and his players alike have praised the effort in the team’s first two practices back from the bye week, continuing a streak of practices the head coach repeatedly called “the best efforts of the season.”

“There were a lot of guys that came back, and I think (keeping the momentum) was something they had on their mind the whole time,” Al-Shaair said. “We came back out with a whole new intensity. I thought it was pretty good.”

FAU hopes its momentum will continue Saturday when it hosts North Texas (4-2, 2-0) for homecoming at 5 p.m.