Blue White Illustrated

Indiana Pregame (10/02/13)

Penn State Sports Magazine

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O'BRIEN CONTINUED FROM 15 there is to study other people and see what they're doing. How do you keep Indiana off the scoreboard this week? They play an up‑tempo style of offensive football, so what do we have to do to make sure that we're scoring? I don't think we can come out of this game with a bunch of field goals. We've got to score points in this game, but we have to do it in mixing tempos. We can't go into this game thinking we're going to go warp speed every drive. I think we've got to get a feel for that during the game, see how the game is going, where we're at in the game, where is the game at halftime. In the second half make our adjustments and make sure that we're doing it the right way to play a good team-complementary football game. What do your graduate assistants do in terms of putting the game plan together for the scout team? Our graduate assistants do a great job. Those are thankless jobs. They don't make a lot of money and they're trying to climb up the coaching ladder. All of our graduate assistants will eventually be full‑time coaches somewhere. They're good, sharp guys. We start our meetings at 2:45 p.m. and we're out on the field at 4:20 for quarterback-center exchange. At around 4 both "Dirty Show" teams are out there with the GAs of the other side of the ball: Defense GAs take the offensive scout team, and offense GAs take the defensive scout team. They go through the plays that they're going to run [on the scout team]. It's a little bit of choreography there that goes into getting those guys ready for practice. With [holder] Ryan Keiser being out, what does that mean to Sam Ficken and the kicking game? I think we will be OK there, because, you know, Alex [Butterworth] holds for Sam during practice, when Keiser is playing safety. Obviously, Keiser is our starting holder, and that's not easy when the holder goes out, but I think we will be OK because Alex does that quite a bit with Sam. How did you know Coach Mac McWhorter would be a good fit for this program? I coached with him at Georgia Tech. I've coached with a lot of great line coaches – Dante Scarnecchia of New England, Doug Marrone. When I was at Georgia Tech, Ralph Friedgen was the line coach. [The late] Pat Watson, who none of you guys have probably heard of, was probably one of the best line coaches of all time in college and coached with us at Georgia Tech, and Joe D'Alessandris, the line coach of the San Diego Chargers. I could list them on and on and on, and what stood out to me about Mac and that group of guys – just like all the great ones – is they understood the big picture. They were very, very detailed and good with their players. They were tough and they were fair. Their players were close to them. They were honest, and I knew that Mac would be a great fit for our program here at Penn State because of all those things. Casual Metropolitan Dining Metropolit Metropolitan opolitan Lunch Lunch and Dinner Small Plates Plates Martini Martini Nights RESTA RESTAURANT RESTAURANT AURANT www.GigisDining.com West College & Cato Ave., State College College Cato Ave State College Cat a State a O C T O B E R 2 , 2 0 1 3 814 . 861 . 3463 16 B L UEWH I T E ON L I N E . COM

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