Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/727005
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 B O W L P R E S S E R You mentioned the need to get off to better starts. Have you been able to pick up on any common threads in the first two weeks, and what as a coach do you need to do to improve on it? I think the first week was a typical first week. Last week [against Pitt], it was a tough environment. That stadium was rocking. There was a lot of emotion. We anticipated all of those things. We did a lot of stuff to work with noise in the sta- dium, and I made some comments to you guys a9er the game about some challenges that we had, but I'm going to move on from now. We didn't handle that as well as we would have liked. First game on the road in a very intense envi- ronment, and we started out a little bit slow. I think the biggest thing… was the turnovers. Turnovers in our own area of the field really put our defense in a tough position. [Limiting turnovers is] the thing we have to do. If you look back to the beginning of time, the beginning of football, if you turn the ball over, you're going to have a difficult time being successful, especially when you do it in your own end of the field. I wanted to ask you about the tack- ling. Why do you think there are tackling issues going on? How sur- prising is it, and how quickly do you guys think you can get that fixed? I think it's a combination of things. It's fundamentals and technique that we need to do a better job of coaching. It's also the fact that, like I mentioned at the beginning of the season, we have the second-youngest team in the FBS. Those things show up when you go on the road and are handling a tough envi- ronment with a young team. And on top of that, [there's] the tack- ling. We need to do a better job. That fine line of what can you do in practice with fundamentals and technique with- out live tackling – I think that's some- thing we need to do a better job of coaching. We have to do a better job of emphasizing, embracing and under- standing that throwing a shoulder is not good enough when you have big, physi- cal running backs. I wanted to ask you about the tempo of the offense. At Pitt, it seemed like you guys ran quicker early in the game and did more with the check- with-me later in the game. Also, you ran three fewer plays than you did against Kent State but you did it in eight fewer minutes. What are your thoughts on that? Tempo is based on what we're antici- pating from the defense, what we've seen on film. Can we get up and run our tempo where we just get up and snap the ball, or do we have the check-with- me plays? A lot of it is based on our game plan and what we've seen on film. Do we feel like we have plays that we can call and get up and run in a quick tempo? The next step is getting in a situation, maybe on third down, where you want to make sure that you have an idea of where the blitz is coming, where the pressure's coming, to find out what coverage they're in and check those sit- uations. You have other situations where they are coming out and showing different looks than what they've shown on film, and you don't feel great about your original call and need to get out of it. So we're going to have some weeks where we go really, really fast. We're going to have other weeks where we're going to have to slow it down. It's all based on what Joe [Moorhead] needs to get us in the best play possible. That's going to vary. That's going to vary week to week based on who we play. You used a couple of different guys on return kickoffs. I'm wondering how you determine who does it when. Is that just a rotation? And re- lated to that, I imagine you want to work Miles Sanders into the game, not just on returns but on offense. How will you determine when he's ready for that? On kickoff returns, we're basically not having as much success there as we want to have. We have a couple guys who we feel have the chance to do it, and we're waiting for someone to take the job. We need to block better with the other 10 guys on the field, but we're waiting for somebody to step up and make some plays, break some tackles, make some people miss and create some big plays and do it consistently. Then we can go with one guy. That's why you're seeing a rotation with those guys back there to figure out who that will be. I think Saquon [Barkley] will have a role, but we'd love for somebody else to be the main kickoff returner and just let Saquon take some throughout the year. And Miles, as a running back, is very similar to Saquon early in the season last year. Saquon didn't have a big role [at first, but] that role improved as the season went on. Miles' situation is a lit- tle bit different with having Saquon as the established starting tailback, which makes those opportunities a little bit smaller. All of those things were dis- cussed before the season started, and we felt before the year was out, we were going to need him and obviously [re- turning kicks] is something Miles wanted to do, as well. So it's a combina- tion of those things. In a perfect world, we would love for him to get a few more opportunities, as well as the other backs. But when we le9 camp, you guys saw the depth chart, and that's kind of where it sits right now. How do you work on ball security with the quarterbacks? Is that some- thing that realistically can be fixed quickly without throwing blind-side hits at quarterbacks during practice? That's one thing that is a little bit dif- ferent. Typically, when you're talking about ball security, you're talking about decision-making at the quarterback position, meaning interceptions, not ball security. We do the same ball secu- rity drills with the quarterbacks that we do with everybody else on the offense every single day. We take a period every single day, every practice since I've been here, and do ball security. Standing in the pocket is a different S E P T E M B E R 1 4 , 2 0 1 6 B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M 12