Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/413187
N O V E M B E R 8 , 2 0 1 4 B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M 12 COACHSPEAK | 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 P O S T G A M E P R E S S E R Opening Statement: I want to open by saying that was the prettiest win I've ever seen in my 20 years. The water tastes better, the Gatorade tastes better, your questions are going to be better. Everything is good right now. I'm really, really proud of our guys. We went down and saw [Ryan] Keiser on Wednesday, and… all he wanted to talk about was the team and how much he missed the team, and how proud he was of Marcus Allen, and all he wanted was the win. So we took a picture in the locker room with his jersey, and we're sending that to him. So, really, really proud of our guys. I thought, overall, special teams did what they had to do. We have to do a better job on kickoffs. [Sam] Ficken has been unbelievable with field goals, but we have to do a better job of kicking the ball deep in the end zone. Grant Haley has been special all year long. We're talking about a guy in open space tack- ling arguably, week in and week out, their best open-field runner. He's been really, really good at it. I thought [Daniel] Pasquariello was a little bit better. I don't know what the stats say, but I thought he was a little bit better today. Our defense was great through- out, and our offense found a way. We were a little bit more productive with the running game. Obviously we've still got some issues with protection and being able to run the ball consistently. But again, this is the prettiest win I've had in my 20 years of coaching. On the defense thriving on chal- lenges: I don't know about that. Their job is to go out and get three-and-outs and turnovers and support our offense, and our offense's job is to support the defense. We all support special teams. Are there times when that's going to come up? Yeah, there's no doubt about it. And that's when the team needs the defense to respond, and they've done a great job of that all year long. On stopping Tevin Coleman: What we wanted to do is what we've really done all year long and that is make peo- ple one-dimensional, stop the run. That's something that we've been able to do. We've been effective against the passing game as well because we've been able to get pressure on quarterbacks. This guy was a lot more slippery than we thought, hadn't really seen that on film. But I thought, obviously, we were re- ally gap sound, we were aggressive, we were able to get off blocks and things like that. And again, we were able to stop a good rusher. You look at his sta- tistics, their offense really went hand in hand with him. They were not an effi- cient offense. They would go zero yards, two yards, three yards, and then break an 80-yarder. And they've been doing that week in and week out. And we've done a pretty good job and put an em- phasis on stopping explosive plays. I don't know if we did a whole lot more than what other people have done, down in and down out. What we were able to do is stop the big plays.