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UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCENovember 11, 2015DeShone KizerSouth Bend, Indiana Q. Coach Clawson was talking yesterday about how he recruited you at Bowling Green, and just talk about how you were as a player and a person. I was wondering what your relationship was like with him and with Bowling Green at that time, and did you have any thoughts about maybe wanting to go there with your dad obviously having gone there? DeSHONE KIZER: Yeah, as a family, we've always been Bowling Green fans. My dad, obviously, is a graduate in '91. Coach Clawson and I had a really good relationship. He was through our high school quite a bit. We even as a high school went and practiced in the indoor facility during the winter time. There was a little talk in the beginning of the recruiting process of trying to possibly go there to play multiple sports, and I had a great relationship with the Bowling Green Falcons. Obviously when he left to go to Wake Forest, it was a big deal for him, and we were obviously expecting that to happen with the success at Bowling Green to move up to a little higher level of football, and he's done a really good job down there now. Q. Obviously, your recruitment kind of blew up pretty fast there. But was there a point when, you said you were talking about playing multiple sports, was there a point where you thought that might have been the destination for you? DeSHONE KIZER: Yeah, you never want to expect for your stock to get any higher than it was at the time. When I was a freshman and going into my sophomore year, I thought that maybe my choice was going to be between Bowling Green, Toledo, and Syracuse. And Bowling Green was definitely very intriguing and the option of possibly playing multiple sports there was going to be pretty fun. Q. Coach Kelly talked this week about your approach on the practice field last week with the red zone and going over the nuances of the offense and doing things collectively in the meeting room. What impact did that have on you specifically, and what impact do you think that it had on the offense? You scored four touchdowns in four entries last week? DeSHONE KIZER: I believe that as a player it impacted me huge in a sense that it brought a focus to an issue that we had as a team that I didn't necessarily put too much emphasis into. Temple was a great example of acknowledging a problem that we had as an offense and not being able to put up points when we were supposed to, and to come together as a unit and to have Coach Kelly, Coach Denbrock and Coach Sanford. Coach Sanford put an emphasis on that on the week allowed me to focus up on what I needed to do to adjust myself in my position to pull up some points down there, and that led to a really good week of practice and a sense of focus down in the red zone to put up points that allowed us to eventually be very successful. Q. The specific example he mentioned was the tight window that you had on the throw to Torii Hunter, more so as applied to Hunter, but just reminding him that, hey, it's going to be a tight window. Did that have an impact on you and your throw as well? DeSHONE KIZER: Yes, when evaluating the Temple game, there is a situation which you tried to throw a tight one to the Will that ended up being an interception, and understanding that instead of shying away from throwing those balls, just having an understanding that everything down there is going to be tight. You know what? The one against Temple that ended up being a pick, just needed to be a better ball. It just had to be placed a little better, and I was going to have to be more aggressive in understanding where the defense was going to be and in that situation the best ball to throw to Torii was going to be low and outside. With an emphasis in practice the week before that I was going to have to make one of those throws, it allowed me to be a little more comfortable and confident putting the ball low and outside, and allowing my receiver to make a really good play. Q. So do you want to take a similar approach this week? DeSHONE KIZER: Yeah, it's going to have to be that way going forward. Anytime we're down there and in a third down situation or a passing situation, I know that the ball's going to have to be within a two-by-two area for our guys to get it, whether it's high and outside or low and away, depending on what the defense is. Q. He said if you're 0 for 4 this week in the red zone he'll go ahead and scrap those meetings then? DeSHONE KIZER: Yeah, for now we'll continue to approach the red zone the way we approached it last week and allow the offense to really understand how important it is to score when we're down in that area. Q. Just wanted to see when you guys were watching last night, and I don't know if you still were watching when Jeff Long was talking, and he mentioned the quarterback play was one of the big reasons why Notre Dame was No. 4, and maybe all you've been through this year, what that was like to hear that considering just in the spring you were the third string guy? DeSHONE KIZER: Yeah, it's really special to acknowledge and respect that some of the bright minds of college football have with me is really cool. But it's more to show how amazing the guys around me have been with lifting me up. I believe that there's no way that I'm in a position to be considered one of the better quarterbacks in the country without the talent that we have around me. With Will Fuller being as successful as he is outside, and with C.J. Prosise running the ball the way he is, it's allowed me to flourish and be successful at my position. It really means a lot for us to be acknowledged in the position we are right now, but obviously we all understand that with the next three games this can completely go in two different directions. We saw it change at a different point in the season last year, and we've got to make sure we take it one by one and keep the same mindset we've had all year and keep approaching the games the way we've been approaching it. I believe that we have the ability to be a playoff contender, it's just about winning this week and today at practice. Q. How have you kept yourself grounded during this run? I know you're a confident guy, and you've experienced a lot of success. How have you kept yourself grounded? DeSHONE KIZER: Just watch my film. There's way too many opportunities that I don't come up successful that keep me down there. There are way too many mistakes that I've made from week to week. Last week was a pretty successful game for the offense, but there's still a couple balls that need to be caught. There are a couple passes that were caught that were spectacular catches that should have been pitching catches. I believe that as a quarterback, the only way to ground yourself is to evaluate your performance. I'm not even near where I should be, and there is still so much room to develop and so much room to get better and mature, that I really need to focus down on. My preparation and correcting those mistakes will be where I allow myself to stay down to earth and continue to prepare and try to do what I can to allow for our offense to be in a position to score points. Q. How much of a resource has Malik been on the sidelines both for home and away games, where you have someone with Coach Sanford up in the box, but you have someone down there too who is a fellow player to kind of talk to and run things through with? DeSHONE KIZER: Yeah, for me and the whole offense he's been doing really well. Temple was his first day he was really down there and fully, physically capable of being up on the sideline and not being at risk to be injured with something coming off the sideline. With that being said, he was able to see the defenses and be able to chart down every coverage that they had for me and some of the blitzes that they were sending at me. Not only does it help me, but it helps the coaching staff, and he's able to relay that to Coach Denbrock and the receivers and such. At the college level, we don't have the ability to come out and have sheets that show defenses and take you play-by-play and take pictures and things like that, so he's kind of that source for me in talking through things and seeing some of the tendencies and some of the patterns that you can't necessarily see up top. Q. Was there a moment against Temple or against Pittsburgh where he said something to you that really clicked? DeSHONE KIZER: Well, yeah. The whole concept against Temple of hitting that honey hole shot at the end of the game was all through Malik letting me know that they were disregarding the outside and safeties were playing too inside on cover two. Malik said that multiple times. Then Corey and Brese said it on one side, and Will said it. They kept putting it in my head, and I finally had the opportunity to do that at the end of the Temple game. Q. I'm curious if you could talk about Mike Sanford's influence on you, and what it's like to be coached by him, how he makes you better? DeSHONE KIZER: He's very special. His ability to communicate and his ability to coach is some of the best I've been able to experience on my own. He takes college football and does it right. There is not a lot of gray area with us. There is always an answer for everything. At the college level specifically being a guy who is stepping into a new world the way I am, he's allowed things to be simplified. He's taken situations in which we didn't necessarily have an answer to, and he gives me a clear and concise answer that allows me to understand the situation a lot better. As much as I'm growing and as much as I'm learning football and taking this day-by-day and developing, he's developing right along with me and allowing me to get a little more leash and allowing me to take the understanding for the game and improve it, and allowing me to just continue to develop. He's a guy who understands the quarterback position really well and understands football really well. He just does a really good job with conveying that to his quarterbacks. Q. Do you have any awareness of where your numbers are starting to align historically? Do you pay any attention to that? DeSHONE KIZER: No, I have no idea. I have no idea. I couldn't tell you how many touchdowns I even have on the season. I have no idea where I'm at. I know that as long as we continue to put up points on Saturdays and win games that hopefully it will be pretty good at the end of the season. Q. And Josh Adams' performance at Pittsburgh, is this something that you would have expected? Did he surprise you at all, or is this what you see in practice all the time? DeSHONE KIZER: We see that all the time. We knew that Josh was just a young gun waiting to get his shot. Once again, we have a next-man-in situation, where we have a guy that comes in and has the game of his career, and that's kind of expected out of him. He's a guy that goes really hard at practice. We see him break some things against our defense when we were going ones verses ones, 11 on 11. We knew all it took was an opportunity for him to get out there and compete, to show the talent that he has. Q. How would you say whether it's Coach Sanford, Coach Kelly, whoever as a whole, your relationship with the coaching staff has evolved in trial by error over the last ten weeks? DeSHONE KIZER: Yeah, it's definitely different than where it was going into Georgia Tech which was my first start. We had to feel each other out. This coaching staff does a really good job with coaching to the talents and the personalities of their players. And they did a really good job with gauging the style of coaching that it's going to take to get the best out of me. They brought me along and kind of threw me to the fire right away, and that was the best decision there. They understand they can do that with a guy like me. And now it's about being able to communicate and being able to talk football and talk game plans at a higher level. And they understand that I'm starting to understand and see things more and more each week, and each week we develop and we move forward in our process of being able to talk football and talk defenses. Q. So do you feel a lot more comfortable, I guess, now of not talking back, but exchanging ideas and asking more questions and not being afraid to speak up? DeSHONE KIZER: Yes, 100%. I believe I have a good grasp on the way they like to game plan. And early in the week in particular we were able to go back and forth and just understand why they make the adjustments that they make. Towards the end of the week it's understood that once a game plan is set in stone, you shouldn't be trying to make last-second adjustments. So we do a good job in the beginning of the week going back and forth. And I like to give as much input as I possibly can into the game plan just so we have a better understanding of what we want to do on Saturday. Q. How much would you say your football IQ, for lack of a better term, has grown through these last couple weeks? DeSHONE KIZER: Quite a bit. I believe that I understood the game really well at the beginning of the year, but you can't speak for the reps. The more reps you get, the better you're going to be able to understand and be able to see defenses. There are a lot of things that you can put up on a board and talk through without playing that sounds right, but you can't really put it out there and show it out in your game. And now with the reps I've gotten and the experience I have, my IQ has grown quite a bit. Q. Was Bowling Green your first offer? DeSHONE KIZER: No, it was not. Toledo was my first offer. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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