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ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

September 28, 2016

Dino Babers

Greensboro, North Carolina

DINO BABERS: Well, we're just so excited to be back at 2-2 and to have an opportunity to go down and play a fine Notre Dame football team, obviously in a little bit of a transition, but they're going to be ready and have their best foot forward. It's going to be a very, very difficult task, and if we can -- hopefully that crowd in Met Life will be 50/50 so we can hear ourselves speak, but something tells me I'd better not hold my breath about that.

Questions?

Q. To kind of assess this team, I know you said you're happy to be back at 2-2, just what you can say assessing the three phases through the first four games of the season.
DINO BABERS: Well, I think that obviously we've had our ups and our downs, and we're not as consistent as we would like to be. I think that losing seven starters from the opening lineups at Colgate to where we are right now, I believe it's seven, maybe it's six, I think that's had a lot to do with it, but to see the young men coming to practice every day and giving their all and having the right enthusiasm and putting the right effort into the daily practices to give us an opportunity to win on Saturday, I think they have definitely been doing their part, and we're going to have to just see how the rest of the season goes.

Q. Going up against a team that just changed their defensive coordinator, just what type of -- how you kind of go after that as a coach, what you look for on film, and how you try to prepare for the fact that there will be a different coordinator out there.
DINO BABERS: Well, honestly, we don't know -- watching the tape really doesn't help you. We'll look at personnel and look at what they've done in the past. You would like to think that they can't change too much, but any time you do -- any time there's a change in the middle of the season, that's pretty drastic, and we have to be ready for a drastic change on defense, as well. So we really don't know what they're going to do on that side of the ball, and we're going to have to just wait and see.

Q. We saw Eric Dungey shaking his hand out a little bit during the UConn game and then he wasn't available for interview last night because he was getting treatment. Any chance he's not going to be able to go this weekend?
DINO BABERS: Well, we're not going to talk about injuries, you know that, so ask me a question I can answer on this thing.

Q. I'm running something on Corey Winfield. I'm curious where you've seen him develop as a cornerback kind of since you got here in the spring.
DINO BABERS: You know, I think he's done a wonderful job. He's actually going to be one of our captains this week, of buying in, techniques and fundamentals, what we're trying to teach. You see him getting better week and week, and as a head coach that's something you're always looking for is what group is getting better and not making the same mistakes that they made week one and week two.

Q. You guys have faced Louisville and Lamar Jackson. If somebody is going to be able to slow him down enough to beat them this year, what is that going to take? What is that going to look like defensively?
DINO BABERS: You know, I am not even going to try to attempt to answer that question. Based off of our performance, I don't have the right to give an opinion on that. You know, you need to ask somebody that's done a lot better against that young man than what we did.

Q. Obviously Colin Byrne is playing a couple of games now with Jason out. Colin told me in high school he had never played center before, he had always played tackle. What did you see from him in training camp or preseason that made you switch him from his normal position and play center?
DINO BABERS: Well, Colin is a long-bodied person. He moves extremely well. And he has a certain personality about him, let me just say that. His personality and the traits off the football field really ties in with what good centers -- the traits that normally good centers have on the football field. In looking at that, we thought maybe we'll give him a shot at center. It was an opportunity for him to get on the field a lot faster than at the position that he was playing before that, and when we made the move, we didn't think that he was going to have to go this year. We thought we'd have Jason. But lo and behold, Jason goes down and now Colin is in the lineup, and these last two games have been decent.

Q. What kind of traits are those that kind of make him a center and not another position on the line?
DINO BABERS: Well, let's just say if he was a movie star, he'd be writing a chopper with the sleeves of his jacket chopped off with a bunch of tattoos.

Q. Watching Notre Dame last week, obviously it's a team with a lot of talent that can do a lot of things, but they've had a lot of problems. Looking at that and expecting a lot of changes this week, how do you prepare for a team like that that might be totally different than what you saw a week ago?
DINO BABERS: You know, you really can't, and the thing that makes it extremely difficult are they are talented. I mean, if you take the 11 players they're going to put out there, they might have 50 to 55 stars out there on the football field. Those are five-star, four-star kids. So they're extremely talented. We have really no idea what they're going to do, and we're going to have to adjust and improvise as the game goes on.

Q. You've seen Kizer play before; people talk about him as a pro prospect at quarterback. What kind of concerns does he create?
DINO BABERS: Well, I just think you can see the intelligence of the young man. You can see he's running a very NFL-style offense under Coach Kelly. If you put that type of intelligence and that kind of system with the physical skills that he has not only throwing the football but running the football, and there's no doubt you have one of the top 10 quarterbacks in the country.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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