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STANFORD UNIVERSITY FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

September 2, 2016

David Shaw

Stanford, California

Stanford - 26, Kansas State - 13

DAVID SHAW: First of all, happy to get a win, and happy to find a way to win, happy to finish the game on the field. Not clean, not pretty in the second half, but we played hard and we showed heart at the end. Very proud of our guys, of course, and their effort.

I thought Ryan Burns played well to start the game. Started out very fast, was in great rhythm, very accurate, made great decisions. We got great protection.

In the second half, offensively they played hard. They played well, and if you don't sustain, you don't strain like we talk about, it's tough to make yards run on pass. So we missed a couple things, gave them the ball back. Give them a lot of credit. Their quarterback was cramping up the kid came out there fighting and played his heart out. But they played really well down the stretch, and they made it a tighter game than it probably should have been.

But once again, that's a really good, well-coached team over at Kansas State. But, once again, proud of our guys and their effort, and hopefully we'll be better in two weeks.

Q. How did you think your offensive line played? You've got three new people, another guy out moving to a different position. How do you think they played?
DAVID SHAW: In the first half, I thought it was stellar. It was very, very good. It was a couple of little tiny things, but for the most part I thought the pass protection was great. I thought the run blocking was well done. They came after us a couple times and got us on a couple blitzes that were not the guys up front. That's not on them.

But I thought first half they played well. Second half I thought we left a little bit out there. We got hit a couple times in the quarterback position. Two of them on touchdown passes. We got, you know, Michael Rector running by another guy and they got in our face a little bit later.

But I thought the first half was very, very good. Second half I thought was good at times. It was good to see us go out there at the end and be very, very physical and get Christian a crease so he could finish like we know he can.

Q. What was your decision to put Keller in in that third drive? And will he and Burns continue to compete for the starting position in two weeks against USC?
DAVID SHAW: Oh, I never talk about competing for starting position. He'll continue to get worked in, but the second half turned in a way we didn't anticipate and hoped that it wouldn't, but wanted him to get in that series in the third quarter, but we sputtered so much, I didn't want to throw a new quarterback into the mix there. But he'll continue to play. He'll play again against USC and he'll continue to play as long as we see prudent.

But I thought he was very good. He was in the game, went in there. I was hoping to get him some more pass attempts, but that's a problem sometimes when you hand the ball to a great player, you don't get enough plays because he finishes in the end zone.

Q. Do you have any update on Harrison Phillips status?
DAVID SHAW: Not yet.

Q. Can you talk about the difference of having some defensive line depth tonight? It looked like they were still getting pushed deep into the fourth quarter.
DAVID SHAW: I can't express how excited I am about our guys, our defensive line. We'll see how Harrison is, but to get great minutes and really good play from Jordan Watkins, from Eric Cotton, from Luke Kaumatule, it allows you to finish the game. It allows you to get some hits on the quarterback late in the game because your guys are fresher.

We saw Solomon Thomas running in the fourth quarter after the quarterback full speed. He can only do that if we rest him and work the other guys in. Same thing with the outside linebackers. Peter Kalambayi last year played way too many plays. So now with Casey Toohill with Mike and just having those four guys along with Joey, we can rotate those guys so at the end of the game, Peter Kalambayi has enough speed left to finish and get a sack.

So very proud of our defensive coaches and very excited about the guys that we have and the challenge for those guys now is we're off to a good start, but now we've got to get better. We've got to make this jump. In the next two weeks we've got to make a huge jump to try to find a way to beat USC.

Q. What is K-State doing on defense in the second half to steimy you? It looked like they were a different team in the second half defensively?
DAVID SHAW: They played really well. They mixed in the pressure. They mixed in blitzes. They're good. That's part of it. They had two plays where, actually three plays where we really had them blocked and one or two guys got unblocked and we had them and had the crease and we were about to hit it and then the guy gets off because they're high-effort people and that's a credit to their coaching staff and credit to the kids that they recruit.

Q. And Jake Bailey seemed to have a really strong game as your punter and kickoff man. Can you talk a little bit about his performance tonight?
DAVID SHAW: Well, Jake's one of those guys but I'm not going to lie. I'm not the expert on punting and kicking at all. But when a guy kicks the ball and you go like this, that means you've got a strong leg. I've never seen a guy after two offsides, which first of all I'm not very happy about, still kicked the ball in the end zone. He's got a very, very strong leg.

Coach Alamar has worked very, very hard with him on continuing to keep that slim, smooth and natural because he's an outstanding kickoff guy and an outstanding punter. And it's not just the deep punts. You saw the two punts inside the 5-yard line, those were beautiful. You can't do them any better. So we're very, very high on him, very excited about him. But at the same time, this is just a start for him. He's got a lot of things he's got to clean up, but he's off to a good start.

Q. Christian's patience when things weren't going in the second half and you get the big line at the end. How important is his patience? How that played out?
DAVID SHAW: By nature, he's not a patient human being. He wants everything to be perfect and that's, like many players, he drives himself and he drives his teammates. Maybe not at the end of the game. He just kept saying it. We're so much better than this. We're so much better. We can be so much better. And some of it's not about yards, it's not about carries; it's about our machine when it's humming. And I thought we were at times really good in the first half and not as good and not as clean in the second half. But at the same time when he touches the ball enough, good things happen.

Q. You have a lot going on that you said you want to fix. Is there one specific thing you want to work on before the USC game?
DAVID SHAW: There's about ten. We have some good athletic quarterbacks we're going to face. I don't know how many sacks we had tonight, but we should have had three more. We've got to put a face on guys and get them on the ground. We had a chance to get a couple balls up in the air. We've either got to rip the ball out of the receiver's hands or intercept it.

But, once again, I loved the effort, but we've got to be a little cleaner in pats protection. We've got to be a little cleaner. I thought we missed a couple throws, too, at the end. But I think bottom line for us we started off well and we ended up lower in the third quarter in all three phases, and came back and finished the game. So I'm happy about that.

But now we've just set the bar for where we are and now in two weeks it's got to be higher. I don't know how high we can get it, but it's got to be higher than it was today.

Q. How much will the fact that you're getting a bye already affect what you guys do this week?
DAVID SHAW: We have plans what we're going to do this week. We planned it a long time ago. The hard part is about the bye this early. That's my subtle way of saying I don't like it this early, is that you can't just give the guys the whole week off because we just started. So we have to work. We have to push ourselves early in the week. But you look at the calendar and we've got 11 straight weeks. So we can't kill them this week because we're not going to get another break. So we're going to work hard early in the week and then we'll tail off at the end of the week and give the guys a couple days off.

When we come back that Sunday night for the USC week, we've got to be ready for an 11-week grind.

Q. 97-yard punt return by McCaffrey was quite a return. It would have been the longest punt return in school history. Did you see, it looked like a slight push from the back maybe by 21?
DAVID SHAW: It was a good call. It was a good call. You know, Chris is not about criticism. There is a reason why there are no 97-yard punt returns because you should not catch the ball on the 3-yard line. He knows that. But it's hard. Sometimes the ball gets high and you think, oh, my gosh, I have a chance to do it now. But what he did after he caught it, wow, that's the best punt return that doesn't count I've ever seen. But he's a special young man, and sometimes they're so special that they override their own mistakes.

So we'll try not to catch those anymore. But if you do catch those, make seven guys miss and score a touchdown.

Q. Do you see any tangible change in the freshness of your players with tapering off in training camp this year?
DAVID SHAW: I think it's a combination. It's hard to point the finger specifically, but it's a combination of us tapering off a little bit earlier, but also having more guys to rotate through so we're able to be fresh and finish this game with some energy and some fire. So I think it was a combination of both of those.

Q. You guys were rotating pretty frequently inside linebacker. Did any of those players catch your eye?
DAVID SHAW: Tough to say, that's tough to say because they all made plays. Bobby Okereke, he's so fast, he made a couple of really big plays. Kevin Palma got off a couple blocks and made some huge run stops, Davis made a couple big hits, couple big tackles. You know, Mustafa, Mustafa's quick and explosive. He really got off the block and made the plays. So all of those guys, Barton made a couple nice plays, and some of the nice plays are not tackles. Some of them are just hitting the offensive lineman and make him turn back toward somebody else so they can make the tackle. It's hard to say without watching the film, but I didn't notice anyone that played poorly wasn't as great a testament to Coach Pete, our linebacker's coach, to get all those guys ready to play and those guys played well.

Q. With Kansas State's onside kick, did that catch you off guard or did they just execute it?
DAVID SHAW: No, they did not catch us off guard. I don't know if we had more guys yelling watch the ball, onside, onside, onside. We just didn't do what we were coached to do and what we do in practice. When you have a kick off returner anyway like Christian McCaffrey, you work on all that stuff. But at that time everyone knew it was coming. They're down by two scores and it's after the safety, they can't afford to kick it deep. We knew it was going to come short. We didn't put the hands team out there because we didn't think we needed to put the hands team out there. But we were not aggressive to the football.

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