Delaware Opens 2016 Season Thursday Night Vs. Delaware State

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- The Delaware Blue Hens will kickoff their 2016 football season on Thursday night as they welcome Delaware State to Newark.

Delaware is coming off a 4-7 2015 campaign, but hopes are high that the Blue Hens can take a big step forward in 2016. Fourth-year head coach Dave Brock was very pleased with what he saw during the preseason.

"I'm really excited about how things went," Brock tells KYW Newsradio. "I couldn't be happier. We had a really competitive, really, really good preseason. A lot of different things that went on and really an exciting opportunity for our team to grow and get better. Thrilled with everything that went on, thrilled with what happened and really looking forward to Thursday night and ready to go."

Listen to the entire interview with Delaware's Dave Brock:

Sophomore Joe Walker will start at quarterback for the Blue Hens again this season. Last year Walker, a product of Philadelphia's Martin Luther King High School, started the final ten games of the campaign and while he proved to be dangerous running the football (422 yards, 3 touchdowns), he struggled in the passing game, completing just 44% of his passes with 1 touchdown and 6 interceptions.

"Joe's grown a lot as a person and certainly as a player," Brock says. "He's had a tremendous off-season, spring practice, summer. Had a great training camp and really got great competition from Blake Rankin and Pat Kehoe. Again, he just performed really well for us throughout training camp. We went good on good, ones on ones the whole time to try to get full-speed, competitive reps and he's done a great job. I'm really excited for him to have the opportunity to go out there Thursday night and show the Delaware fans how much improvement he's made."

The Blue Hens running game is expected to be outstanding once again. Last year they averaged 219.4 yards a game on the ground. Delaware is loaded at the running back position with senior Jalen Randolph, junior Wes Hills and sophomore Thomas Jefferson. Randolph and Hills are returning this season from injuries. The Delaware defense is also expected to be a strength with a load of talent back from a unit that allowed just 20.5 ppg in 2015.

Delaware State is coming off a 1-10 2015 campaign. Brock says they are a bit of a mystery coming into the 2016 opener.

"Really probably 60% of their roster is new," Brock says. "A lot of the guys I think who play in the game will be playing their first college game at Del State. So we've really been looking at a lot of different venues to see what the players are like. Junior college film, high school film, certainly some Del State film from last year. They have a new defensive coordinator, so we don't have a great feel for exactly what they're going to do. We have some ideas. But once you get out in the game, you're going to have to adjust and improvise and we've told the players, 'Let's do what we do and do it fast and physical.' And we feel good about it."

Delaware and Delaware State will kickoff at 7:00pm on Thursday night.