After eight weeks against arguably the toughest schedule for any Southwestern Athletic Conference team, the Alcorn State Braves finally enjoyed a bye week.

The Braves are 3-5 and 3-3 in the SWAC Eastern Division after last week’s 52-37 loss at Prairie View. After the bye, they have three games left, starting with a Nov. 3 trip to Mississippi Valley State (2-5, 2-4) and followed by home games with Texas Southern and Jackson State.

First-year Alcorn head coach Jay Hopson said this week’s bye comes at a good time.

“It’s good to have a week off, because it lets us focus on a strong finish on those first three Saturdays in November,” Hopson said during this week’s SWAC teleconference. “We’ve got a lot of guys banged up after eight straight weeks, so it’s a good time for us to get well. We can also go back and work on some fundamentals.”

One area that needs to be addressed is Alcorn’s defense. The unit played well in back-to-back wins over Southern (20-17) and previously unbeaten Alabama A&M (21-20), but was torched for 251 passing yards and four touchdowns by Prairie View quarterback De’Auntra Smiley.

Hopson said it was a combination of things that hurt his team in Texas.

“It didn’t go the way we wanted,” Hopson said. “Prairie View has a very underrated team. It’s a 17-10 game when they hit the Hail Mary

pass and that didn’t help us. Early in the third quarter, we had a fourth-and-2 and we thought we had it, but didn’t get it. They score and go up 31-10. Our guys kept battling. We score and go for an onside kick and didn’t get it.”

Up 31-17, Prairie View scored three touchdowns over the final 11⁄2 quarters and won by 15.

The good news for the Braves was that freshman quarterback John Gibbs had his best game of the season. He will enter the final three weeks having completed over 50 percent of his passes for 790 yards with four touchdowns. Seniors Terrance Lewis and Marti Shelby have emerged as threats with a combined 41 catches for nearly 400 yards.

In evaluating his team after eight weeks, Hopson said it was all about being able to compete in the SWAC.

“We wanted to be competitive and give ourselves a chance to win our league games,” he said. “When we didn’t do things we needed to do, we didn’t deserve to win those games.”