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We're not at a point right now where we're going to burn someone's redshirt unless we have to, but that's all part of the discussions going on this week. How is Saquon Barkley physically following the bye week? The bye week, I think, for Saquon was important. As we all know, a few weeks ago, he got an injury. I would say he's still been productive and still playing well, but he's not 100 percent. I think the bye week for him was probably, as it was for a number of our guys, very im- portant to get him as close to 100 per- cent as he possibly can be. From a workload perspective, each week he gets more confident in his pro- tections, each week he gets more confi- dent in his ability to carry the ball at critical times. All the way from week one, those things have kind of in- creased, the number of reps he's gotten as well as the number of carries. We just feel, like you guys probably feel, he's a dynamic player and doesn't necessarily physically or mentally look like a freshman at times. So we want to continue to build on that. We're fortu- nate we have depth at that position, where if he does need a blow or we need to rotate some guys in there, we're able to do that. But at times he's been a dif- ference-maker for us. We want to try to give him opportunities to impact the game. Michigan has had one of the best run defenses in the country. It looks like they're in a five-man front al- most all the time. How unusual is that? Also, what, if anything, can you learn from what Indiana was able to do last week, where they ran for over 300 yards. You're exactly right, they're in a five- man front all the time. They'll overload you in the box. They're going to play a lot of man coverage, press across the board, even more than usual. A lot of times, if you have two receivers on one side, one will be pressed. One will be off to stop pick routes and things like that, and they just say, no, we're going to cover you press man all the way across the board and make it really difficult to find yards. There are no yards in the box looking at it in the run game, and there are no yards on the perimeter that they're giving you. You're going to have to earn all of it. So like I talked about, they're a veteran defense. They were good last year on defense and pretty much returned everybody as well. What Indiana was able to do is their back, who's having a heck of a year, he's 230 pounds, was able to break tackles and make people miss, and they wore them down. Indiana, like we talked about when we played them, they're big on both fronts. They were able to match up size-wise, and they battled them, and they made just enough plays to kind of stay in the game. As the game went on, their O- line and their running back was able to keep chipping away at them. Obviously, that film and the Min- nesota film were good films for us. We watched those two games, games with similar formations, similar philosophies and things like that that are valuable for our guys to see. The Minnesota game, the thing that stood out about that game, probably different than Indiana, was that [the Gophers] made plays. That's what really jumped out about Minnesota. They won a bunch of those one-on-one situations and came down with the ball. Indiana was different be- cause they kind of wore them down with the run game and the big backs. So two different types of games. We're probably going to have to do a combina- tion of both. Based on your prior knowledge of Jim Harbaugh and whatever interac- tions you might have had with him, and then watching this year's squad on film, what's your sense of the im- pact he's had on the program? Their whole staff has had an impact. They have. They're good coaches. Obvi- ously, his background with Michigan is helpful, and then back to what I men- tioned before, the fact that they have 18 seniors starting for them, and if you count juniors and seniors, they have 23. Twenty-three of their 25 starters are juniors or seniors. So it's a combination of all those things. They're the oldest team in the Big Ten, and they're the oldest team in the coun- try. The combination of that, the staff and the fact that Coach [Brady] Hoke had two top-five recruiting classes and a top-10 class has worked out well for them. They're playing really good foot- ball right now. I know our guys are ex- cited and our staff's excited to have the opportunity to play them in Beaver Sta- dium. Having had a chance to go back and look at it, have you put your finger on what some of the issues are with the run defense? Is it tackling? Is it more than that? The thing that's interesting is, if you look over the five years that I've been together with [defensive coordinator] Bob [Shoop], what we've done a good job of is limiting big plays, limiting big plays in the pass game – this year we've done a good job of that – and limiting big plays in the run game. Bob's got some statistics that I don't have in front of me, but if you look at a large percent- age of our runs, we've played very good defense. But there have been too many explosive runs. You're going to get a run against you for 8 yards or 12 yards. You can't have the runs for 35 and 45. Those kill you. They obviously swing field position, they swing momentum, and that's what we're not doing a great job of, and that's just as easy as a guy who's coming up from the second level or the third level who doesn't fit correctly, and now all of a sudden, instead of tackling the guy for a 12-yard gain, it now goes for 35. That's what we haven't done a great job of this year at times – giving up big plays in the run game. Again, for five years we've done a good job of that. So that's been an emphasis all week long, things that we've talked about, things that we've discussed with our players, with the coaching staff. We looked at it from every angle. We went back and studied the last five years. That's the biggest difference. The biggest difference is the explosive runs. It's not like we're seeing or facing dif- ferent schemes. It's about that second level, the linebackers, and the third level of the defensive backs, making sure they get the guy on the ground and that our fits are correct. N O V E M B E R 1 8 , 2 0 1 5 B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M 15

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