Blue White Illustrated

N O V E M 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 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 How successful were you in keeping the guys and coaching staff away from the Ohio State-Michigan game? When did you find out the result? I didn't find out obviously until the crowd erupted, and I just assumed that's what it was. … I think over the week, we managed it and we're going to have to continue to do that all of next week as well. Stay focused on the thing that truly matters, which is this team. Continue to develop, continue to sup- port one another, and I think overall our guys tuned it out pretty good. I know right when that happened, Trace [Mc- Sorley] came to me on the sidelines and asked what's going on and he was going to find out sometime, so I just told him that I assumed Ohio State had won. He didn't bat an eye, and we kind of went on from there. I was thinking about it in the locker room. I don't think we were necessarily rooting for one team. I wouldn't necessarily say we were doing that, but we sure did want another team to lose. That might be the best way to describe that. Did you think you had them set up with the deep ball a$er the short passes in the first half? No, but they were doing a lot of the cross dog blitzing with the two inside linebackers to make it difficult on the run. They were widening and rushing them up the field to take some of our perimeter run away. They were playing really so@ at defensive back, basically saying, "We're going to overload you in the box and make it difficult for your young offensive line to pick up all the gains. We're not going to allow you to get the chunk plays on us." But we have talented wide receivers, and our offen- sive line did a really good job of strain- ing and protecting. I think [Ryan] Bates at tackle has really helped us, because we have lost a lot of linemen and I think Chasz [Wright] and Bates have done a really nice job for us. [Brian] Gaia's leadership has been great and our wide receivers and tight ends, if we can hold on to the ball and give them enough time, they can make plays. You finished the game aggressively. Were you trying to finish the game on a high note as far as throwing in the last couple of minutes? No, we were running our offense. We were having a hard time running the ball all night long and what we were able to do was throw the ball, so we were going to continue to do that, noth- ing more than that. We had to run our offense, and we tried to run the ball on our next drive and we went three-and- out. The last thing you want to do is go three-and-out. You want to end the game on your terms, and if they're going to… force us to throw the ball, that's what we're going to do.

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