Blue White Illustrated

of sacks and tackles for loss, but also just the attitude and the energy that he brings to practice every single day with his guys. Do you have some things that you do in practice based on past coaching stops or what you've done before to handle road game atmospheres that are not like Beaver Stadium or Ann Arbor or Pittsburgh? Yeah, we do. Like one of the things that we're doing right now is typically we have really loud music playing at practice or loud crowd noise or fight songs and bands of the opposing team and things like that. This week [the] environment will be a little bit different than that. So we talked all week long about our players bringing their own juice. I'm hoping that the Penn State Alumni Association chapters from all over that region come out and support us. I know our families and friends will be there, as well. I probably should have looked this up ahead of time, but I could imagine we have a good number of Penn State grads living in that area, so I hope they all come out and support us. We try to prepare our guys each week. Like I said, we play the fight songs, or practice at night or indoors or outside in the rain or whatever it may be, to try to prepare our guys throughout the year for whatever they may see. And then specifically that week, we do everything we possibly can. You can't change the schedule too much. If it's a 12 o'clock game, it's not like we can practice at 12 o'clock every single day [because of class conflicts]. But we have done that in the past. Your defensive line looks com- pletely different now than it looked at the beginning of the season. Can you talk a little about the key to their de- velopment, and why did everything come together last Saturday night for them? Yeah, it's not real profound. They are gaining experience. They were inexpe- rienced guys at the beginning of the year. We have guys like Parker [Cothren] who has played a decent amount of football and [Torrence] Brown and [Garrett] Sickels who have played a de- cent amount of football for us. But the other guys lacked experience. Robert Windsor is a redshirt freshman and has had a big role for us this year. There are guys like that, you know, guys who are coming on for us. You look at Shareef [Miller], there's another guy. Those guys were redshirts last year. I think that the biggest difference from the be- ginning of the year till now is the expe- rience that they have gained by playing week-in and week-out. So [it's a matter of] having success, being coached hard, being really de- manding on those guys and those guys gaining in confidence and experience and knowing what to expect. And I think also, they've realized, individually and collectively, that they can be pretty good. When you have success, your confidence grows every single day, and those guys are doing that. Being in the shotgun in victory for- mation, I'm not sure I had ever seen that and it seems a little more risky than being right up under center. What was the thinking there? I don't want this to come off the wrong way, but almost everybody who runs the spread and runs shotgun, they don't go under center for victory, all the games that I watch. It doesn't make sense in our minds. You could make the same argument on a quarterback sneak or you could make the argument on the third-and-1 and get up and run the quarterback sneak. The problem is, we never take a snap from under center. We don't do that in our offense. So now to do that in a victory situa- tion or on short yardage, that's some- thing where you believe in what you do. We just never do it. I've never seen Joe [Moorhead] call for a snap from under center since he's been here. So doesn't make sense to do that in forming an offense at a critical situation in the game in victory. I know you could say, well, couldn't you practice it? But now you're going to take time practicing something that you're only going to do less than one percent of the time. Yeah, all the people that I know that run shotgun offenses, that's what they do in victory. What are your thoughts on being back in the Top 25? I think it's great. I think the poll that really matters is the one at the end of the season, but it's nice. It's nice to be part of that conversation again. You know, it's good. It's good. We're appre- ciative of it, how people view our pro- gram and the direction the program is headed. It's not going to get us a point on Saturday against Purdue, but it's nice to be a part of those conversations again. O C T O B E R 2 6 , 2 0 1 6 B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M 13 PSUtixman@gmail.com www.PSUtixman.com Get your PSU Football Tickets at go t ti cke t s? k c i t t t e k man@g .PSUtixm www.PSUtixman.com at ootba Get yo k c i t t o gm .PSUtixman.com all ur s t s e k

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