Blue White Illustrated

S E P T E m B E R 2 0 , 2 0 1 5 B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . c O m 14 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 When you said Saquon Barkley has brought something to your offense, what exactly is something? I think to be a running back, it's all about breaking tackles and making peo- ple miss. Obviously [it's also about] pass protection and things like that, but to me a running back has got to bring that to the table. The offensive line, the tight end and coaches are going to try to get the running back into the position to be one-on-one, and the running back must win more than 50 percent of those one-on-one situations, and he's been able to do that. I think he and Akeel [Lynch] are able to do some really nice things. It's exciting to think about all the young players playing for us, being led by all the veteran players we have. I'm just excited that we're getting bet- ter. It's about getting better every single day, every single week, and I've seen signs of that. We've got a lot of things we can still clean up. I think early on in the game we hurt ourselves with penal- ties. I think our Jersey guys were a little juiced up; Angelo Mangiro had two penalties in his first two drives. I think they were a little juiced up, but once they settled down, they were good. To me, that's the frustrating thing as a coach, but also the exciting thing as a coach. We have to get those things cleaned up and once we do, we've got the chance to do some nice things. It seemed like your O-line was play- ing with a lot of confidence. How im- portant is that to the development of that group? I think that's what it is for us. We have the ability on the O-line to play with confidence. Also, when running backs start making people miss breaking tack- les and making great plays, it inspires them. It's no different than a good kick- off returner or punt returner. I think it's a combination of those things. Plus, the better we run the ball and make some big plays in the running game, the less chaos we get. When we can't run the ball and we are predictable in throwing, we get chaos constantly. The running game is going to help us in protection, get more base looks and all of those things. So we're going to continue to work on it and I thought we managed the game much better in all three phases. Where do you think Christian Hackenberg's confidence is? It looked like he struggled a little bit tonight. No, I think he's managing the game re- ally well. He made some great checks at the line of scrimmage to get us into runs and certain looks against their blitz looks that we had worked on all week long. Two out of three of our games have been in pretty interesting weather conditions. The plan was to run the ball. It became even more a part of [the game plan] when the weather conditions got how they got. … We've seen at times what Christian can do when we protect him. That will come over time, and pretty soon we'll have a balanced offense that's able to do both really effectively.

• Cover