Blue White Illustrated

S E P T E M B E R 2 6 , 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 What did you think of the perform- ance of Saeed Blacknall? Was he given an increased role, or did it just happen to work out? What did you think of his night? I think a lot of the time you guys think the game plan is to just run the ball and not [throw] the ball more than five yards down the field. It's really just kind of how it plays out. We always have shots in the game plan, we always have go's in the game plan. It just depends on the flow of the game and how things are going. The first one we hit to Saeed was a quick gain where we were throwing a sticker out to the tight end, but they had everybody so low down in the box, Hackenberg took a shot up the field it had good air under it and we made a play. We want to be able to do those things. That was the defense we talked about all week long; they had everyone out within eight yards of the line of scrimmage, high-risk, high-reward. We were able to run and pass early on in the game. Late in the game we weren't, so we had to mix things up, get the ball down the field, take some shots, the Hackenberg back pass, things like that. I think we can continue to be aggressive like that. It looked like they were daring you to throw the ball. Talk about the ad- justments that your guys had to make, the receivers, protection and also Christian? You know, it wasn't anything that was new that just showed up in this game. They showed that in film, and their head football coach is their defensive coordinator. His entire career, that's kind of been his style. So we kind of an- ticipated that's how the game would go, so we worked on it all week long, the run and the throw, kind of mixing things up. We had a lot of respect for their corners. Tonight our guys were able to run past them and make some plays, it was about what we anticipated going into the game. The kick return game – do you have any idea where that went wrong? What did you think was different about the coverage? It's hard to tell, but if I had to imagine, guys got washed out of their lanes. I do know that [the Aztecs] went into this week with a game plan that they were going to double-team Nick Scott, which makes sense. I would do the same thing. He's been playing really well on the kickoff coverage, but we didn't punt the ball consistently today, and we didn't kick the ball consistently today. We kicked the ball out of bounds, we kicked the ball in the middle of the field, and now that throws off all of the assign- ments and all the lane discipline that we need to have. I need to watch the tape on that, but they had a plan that they were going to take Nick Scott out with a double- team, I know that. Then we weren't consistent with our kick locations, which puts stress on the kickoff cover- age.

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