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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 R O S E B O W L P R E S S E R Some fans expressed disappoint- ment that you didn't make it to the College Football Playoff. What have you sensed from your players since you accepted the Rose Bowl invita- tion in terms of excitement level? I think our guys are really excited. I think it's fair and obvious to say that our guys and myself and everybody would love to have been part of the four. But again, there were cameras in there live when we made the an- nouncement, and we didn't make the playoffs, and we're going to the Rose Bowl. There's excitement about that. We've had a wonderful season. A lot of really good things have happened. There's been tremendous growth from the beginning of the season to the end, and we're playing a good football team. You watch these guys and you study these guys, and you look at their tal- ent, you can make an argument that if you just take where teams are at at the end of the season and don't talk about overall record but just say, who are the best teams in college football right now, you could make an argument that USC would be in that conversa- tion. Before the next question… I know you guys want this all year long and I never give it to you, but now I can. Season- ending injuries: Some of these, you guys were aware of, some you're not. Bren- dan Mahon, Paris Palmer, Andrew Nel- son, Chance Sorrell, Jan Johnson, Nyeem Wartman-White, Jason Vranic, Jake Cooper, Von Walker, Brandon Polk and Nick Bowers. We don't talk about a lot of those things during the season, as you guys know, because I want people to have to prepare for the possibility of those guys coming back at some point not know- ing when that's going to happen, but those guys all had season-ending in- juries. I hear a lot of other programs and a lot of other media people talk about in- juries and things like that and what they had to overcome. We had a lot to over- come this year. I will put that out there so that you guys are aware and then we can just move on and never talk about it again. You guys are No. 1 in fourth-quarter point differential. You've outscored the competition by 111. Alabama is No. 2 at 85. There's a big gap between you and everyone else. What is it this year that's allowed you guys to be so effective in the fourth quarter, and how has that allowed you to get to the Rose Bowl? I think we do a great job during the week of keeping our guys fresh. I think we did a good job all year long of keep- ing our guys fresh, and it was much easier to manage this year being back to 85 scholarships, which is what I'm used to doing as a head coach. I never had to manage 65 scholarships or 75 scholarships. I think we got back to something that we're more comfort- able doing. Our coaches do a great job at half- time of making adjustments, getting our guys calmed down. I think I've mentioned this to you guys before. It's late in the season, and you don't really talk about being a young team any- more. But I do think there were times where our guys would get a little fraz- zled in the first quarter and we would need to get them settled down, espe- cially on the offensive line where we were playing a bunch of young guys late in the season. Getting those guys into halftime and getting them calmed down was no different than little league and Pop Warner, getting them some orange slices and allowing them to go to the bathroom and being able to sit down and talk to them and not hav- ing to sprint right back on the field. We were able to get those things cov- ered. We do things a little bit different, and I think it's a nice adjustment that we made this off-season. The first thing that we do: The offense breaks and the defense breaks like most peo- ple in the country, but Charles Huff now goes out and talks to the special teams as a full team, anybody who's involved in special teams. He does that while the offense and defense are meeting. Then he comes back in with the offense. And Joe [Moorhead] prob- ably is a little bit different from most of the coaches I've ever been around. He actually spends a lot more time with the coaches and then gets with the players really at the last minute to kind of get his thoughts organized with the coaching staff, what things are going well, what things do we need to get cleaned up, and then gets out with the players kind of at the last minute, to be honest with you. But I think we've done a good job. So I think it's a combination of the coaches doing a great job of getting things ad- justed and figuring out who people are going to be, but I think more than any- thing, it's just a young team that doesn't have a whole lot of reps and experi- ences… whereas an older player may see something that you weren't expecting in the game, but he saw it earlier in the year or saw it last year and can fall back on that experience. I think that's proba- bly the biggest difference. And then I think, like I said, being fresh [is important]. The fact that we rotate so many guys on the defensive line, you look at us over the last three years and the majority of our sacks have come in the second half of the game. I think that's because we rotate guys and we keep guys fresh as the game goes on, we just keep wearing you down with the number of guys that we're playing and we're able to have some success there. I think the other thing is [that the de- fense] is holding people, and our offense is scoring more points. Because of the combination of those two things, it al- lows everybody on the sideline to feel like we're never out of a game because we have the ability to score, because we have the ability to hold people, where I think maybe in years past in other situ- ations I've been in, it maybe puts too much stress on one side of the ball or the other. I've also brought it up multi- ple times to you guys, our special teams I don't think have gotten enough credit D E C E M B E R   3 0 ,   2 0 1 6 B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M 14

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