Will Troy be contenders or pretenders?

That’s the question head coach Neal Brown says the Trojans must answer in the next five weeks of play.

Even though the Trojans are 4-0 in the Sun Belt Conference and 6-1 overall, they still face a tough conference schedule.

“We are fighting, and we understand that we still have to play the best teams in our league. The narrative of our season is still unwritten,” Brown said on Monday. “How we perform over these next five weeks will really determine if we are pretenders or contenders. In our current state, we are not good enough to win our league.”

Brown said coaches shared that message with players as they wrapped their bye week after having defeated instate rival South Alabama 28-21.

It’s been 17 days since the Trojans suited up to play a football game, and going into Saturday’s contest the Trojans have played just two games in the last 28 days. “We have had a productive bye week,” Brown said. “We took a totally different approach than we did the last bye week. Coming off the Idaho trio we really focused on getting our body and mind well and refreshed. This week, we really practiced hard and focused on getting better.”

The Trojans will close out the non-conference portion of their schedule on Saturday when they host UMASS at 2:30 p.m. Saturday. AFter that, they face Appalachian State, Arkansas State, Texas State and Georgia Southern.

“We practiced hard and we feel like we made some good strides. We have to continue to get better. We are looking forward to getting back out in front of our home crowd,” Brown said. “It feels like it has been a while.”

Over the last two games the Trojans have allowed a combined 42 points and 758 yards. Defensive coordinator Vic Koenning focused the Trojans back to the basics during the week.

“You always have to focus on tackling,” Koenning said. “A couple guys on our team haven’t been tackling as well as they had done at the beginning of the year. We have to work on pass defense and coverage skills. We have to continue to not make mistakes like we did against South, just little attention to detail mistakes that we worked on.”

Coming off the high-energy win over South, the Trojans enter the meat of their conference schedule with the goal of winning a conference championship.

“I think you always re-evaluate your goals are based on how the first half of your season went,” Brown said. “If we want to be conference champions, we’ve got to understand that we’re not good enough as-is. We’ve got to continue to make steady improvements. Once our guys understood that, I think our leaders did an outstanding job of pushing people in practice.”