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N O V E M B E R 2 1 , 2 0 1 5 B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . c O M 7 Can you take us through that first series in the red zone? It looked like Christian Hackenberg had checked into a run on a third down. Can you talk about the play-calling on those types of plays? Yes, we made multiple run-pass checks, where basically we are calling a run play with a pass, and he goes up and we are trying to find our best situation to be successful, based on numbers in the box. If they overload, then we want to throw the ball; if they are giving us the opportunity to run the ball by playing coverage, then we run the ball. So that's what those calls were, so we could get the best situation to be successful. That's what happened. It ended up being three runs, but they weren't all three run calls, they were checked with these. How do you assess your tackling today on defense? I thought at times it was good. When they got the ball on the perimeter with some of the key screens, when we over- loaded them in the box, that's what we call key screens, the receiver screens out on the perimeter. We didn't do a great job with force a couple of times and then missed some tackles in the open field. I thought really the thing that hurt us defensively was third down. We got them in third-and-long number of times and weren't able to get off of the field consistently. We saw Carl Nassib briefly early on. Was that just trying to see if he could gut through it and go? And also, can you talk a little bit about the effort you got from Brandon Bell tonight? Carl was limited, obviously from the previous game. He was limited all week, and we hoped that by limiting his reps in practice all week that we would see how he would feel on Saturday. I could tell Friday at the walk-through he wasn't feeling great, but he wouldn't tell us that. And then, on Saturday you could tell during warm-ups that he wasn't feeling great and once we saw that, he wasn't going to be able to go and help us and help himself. Then we made the change and pulled him out. I thought Brandon did nice things. I don't know what the stats say, but I think overall that he did some really, really good things. His leadership is excellent he has so much passion and pride for the game and Penn State. He's a good football player and he is going to continue to be a good football player. How much do your special teams need to improve going forward? We made a big play with the blocked punt, which was huge, but then we gave up two big plays. … There is no doubt there are some issues that we have to get cleaned up. It's everything. It's kick- ing, it's coverage, it's kicking location. All those things are very inconsistent right now. C O A C H S P E A K 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

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