Blue White Illustrated

N O V E M B E R 1 2 , 2 0 1 6 B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . c O M 7 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 Opening statement: I'm really proud of our guys. [The team] battled through a bunch of different things. Right now I think we have one offensive lineman playing the position he played at the beginning of the season, Brian Gaia. We have a lot of injuries. We're on our fourth or fiAh offensive tackle situation. We lost Paris today. We lost McGovern today. Got Bates playing tackle for the first time this week. Never really repped him there at all since he's been here. Then we have Gonzalez who hasn't played a whole lot of football, but pretty much played the whole game, so I'm proud. Our guys didn't panic. Obvi- ously our defense played really well. All of the turnovers, we weren't able to capitalize on them early on. The fourth- down stop was huge. I thought our spe- cial teams were really solid, so we were able to get in at halAime and kind of get the offensive line settled a little bit. They were blitzing almost every play, extending almost every play. We didn't make plays on the perimeter early in the game. In the second half, we were able to do that and it opened it up. They were put- ting the corners on an island and play- ing a high-risk, high-reward defense. With an inexperienced [offensive] line not playing the positions that they nor- mally play, it was a good plan on their part. In the end, we found a way to get a win on the road. I'm just really proud of our guys. I aged probably five or six years. I'm al- ready an old 44-year-old as it is, so that's probably not good for me. On making second-half adjust- ments: I thought Joe [Moorhead] did a really nice job of continuing to mix [the run] in. We were running away from the blitz in the first half, slanting the front. Then in the second half, we ran into the blitz and fanned the offensive tackle and guard out into that and got a hat on hat, and now they're slanting away from where we're going, so I thought that helped us. On Indiana's game plan: They had a good plan. You have to give them credit. I thought the most important thing that we did was that we didn't panic. Our defense kept us in the game, so we didn't have to get in a situation where we were chucking it every down. d Again, it was a gutsy, gutsy win on the road. ... You look at our wins, every win is different. When you have a young, developing, growing team, that's an im- portant trait, finding all different ways to win. That is what this team is doing right now, so I'm proud of them. The run late in game where [Barkley] and Gozno and some other guys pushed the pile, I thought that was huge. You guys all saw that post in the summer where he was squatting in the Lasch Building. That's what that was right there. It showed up on that play.

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