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C O A C H S P E A K • E X C E R P T S F R O M J A M E S F R A N K L I N ' S W E E K L Y P R E S S E R What did you see on film from your defense, including the experienced and inexperienced players, in the fourth quarter Saturday? It doesn't take 23 years' coaching expe- rience to say we didn't tackle well. I think that's probably the biggest thing that stood out. Too many missed tackles. That's a constant conversation with de- fensive coaches and offensive coaches during camp and other head coaches I've talked about with all the rule changes: How much do you tackle in preseason to make sure your guys are ready to go in game one and don't have a situation like that where we miss so many tackles? I think that's the biggest thing that stands out. I wrote a note down that we're going to have to look at our camp model next year and do a little bit more tackling without putting ourselves in a situation where we increase the injury rate. So that's the fine line there. I thought we had some guys who just weren't playing fast. We weren't trigger- ing off the ball up front the way I think we're capable of. We weren't in great alignments sometimes. We weren't get- ting hands on receivers. They had a good play and they were getting the ball out of the quarterback's hand quickly. They did some good things in the running game with their outside zone, and we were get- ting reached and not gap accountable, es- pecially at the defensive tackle position. So we've got to get those things cleaned up. And then offensively, we were just in- consistent. We would go on a long scoring drive one time and then go three-and-out the other. And three-and-outs are bad words. They're bad words on offense and they're bad words for your program. They put your defense in a tough spot as well. And then I think the other thing is rota- tion. It's easy to sit here and say we should have just rode our starters out. But I would say the opposite. I think we proba- bly should have played some more young guys, because if you look at our rep count, I think our rep count factored in the first game in the fourth quarter. I'm a big be- liever that if we can get our rep count down, that will help us in the fourth quar- ter of that game and will help us through- out the season. So I actually think we could have played some more guys and gotten some more guys some reps. I think that would be helpful for us. And then on special teams, we had a bunch of new starters, especially on our kickoff coverage, and it hurt us. Guys ran out of their lanes. We weren't lane disci- plined. We created a natural lane in there for the kickoff return, and that guy can run. So I think they outkicked us on Sat- urday. Their kickoffs consistently were deep in the end zone. Their punts were deep. And they were able to win the field position battle because of that, which is something I probably would not have thought coming into the game. So we've got to get those things cleaned up. But overall, we were able to find a way to get a win and learn from it and grow. How did you think Michal Menet did in his first start? And also the guy he flipped spots with, Connor McGovern, how do you think he did in his move back to guard? There were some growing pains there. I think it's probably not an ideal situation when your center, who's starting the first game of his career, is playing an odd de- fense where you've got a nose [tackle] right over your head. The positive was that we didn't have any bad snaps, which typically is an issue with first-time starters at center. But being in a situation where you've got a true zero nose right over your head is probably not ideal. We've got to play lower. We've got to be more aggressive. We've got to displace people a little bit more oCen. … I don't think [they] played up to the standards that I know they want to play at or that we need them to play at. But once again, we were able to make those corrections on film. We were able to make those corrections in a walk- through setting, and now we've moved on to our next opponent. And that odd- front will show up on third down, be- cause Pitt does a good job with their third package, especially on third-and-6 or more, when they get into that odd front, mug up the linebackers, give you a bunch of different pressure looks and twists that are going to be challenging. They do a good job of getting free runners at the quarterback. How would you rate your defense as far as communication with some newer faces in there, especially presnaps where a few times guys had to be re- aligned? You had to call the timeout in overtime. The timeout in overtime was basically [because it] was a critical play in the game, and I'm going to use the timeout. There's no reason to save the timeout. Burn the timeout, make sure we've got the best call, that everything is communi- cated, that we know exactly what we're doing and why, and that was the reason we called the timeout there. I just felt like, hey, no reason to go through the first overtime period and not use it. But communication, again, with all the first-time starters and the first-time guys playing, gaining experience, it wasn't as good as it needs to be. And those are some of the things that we cleaned up on Sun- day in the film session. Those are some of the things that we talked about on the field on Sunday when we walked through some of the mistakes and things like that. But yeah, we look at communication as a fundamental, no different than tackling and blocking. Communication is a funda- mental in football, and we weren't as good as we needed to be on Saturday. The interesting thing is that you spend so much time focused on communication on offense when you go to away stadiums that I think sometimes you don't empha- size how you need to communicate on de- fense at home. There's a similar challenge there. Usually there's less communication that happens on the defensive side of the ball. But it's still critical. In overtime, you ran the ball every play, looked good, scored the touch- down. How do you think those guys did at the end of the game? Do you think they performed better? I think in the first drive we played well. I think at the end of the game we played well. I think we played well in the red zone. We were great in the red zone. Why? Because we were able to run the ball. I thought our offensive line had a mentality S E P T E M B E R   5 ,   2 0 1 8 B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M 10

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