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RUTGERS UNIVERSITY FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCEAugust 27, 2017Chris AshPiscataway, New Jersey COACH ASH: Thanks for coming on a Sunday. Appreciate a different routine and really appreciate you guys coming. Game week's finally here. Week one of 2017 is finally here. Very excited about, we've got a great opponent coming to town. Excited to go watch our football team, see an improvement we have been able to make from last year to this year. Excited for training camp to be over a much as anything. It's been a long training camp, four week. Longer than any training camp any of us have been a part of with the new NCAA rules. Really looking forward to going to play somebody else other than beating on each other every day in practice. Just talking about Washington quickly, it's a very good football team, very talented football team; a football team with a lot of experience coming back from last year's final four team. Hopefully college football fans here in this regional show up big on a Friday night. It's not a traditional team that will probably make a return trip to New Jersey or Rutgers in the future. If you want to watch a good football team and a good football game, I think it would be a great environment to come and be part of. There's a lot of fun activities the administration has planning, outside the stadium, in the stadium and hoping to provide a great experience for people to show up. Hopefully it's a great turnout. Should be with the type of team that we have coming in to play us and the type of team that we hopefully have showing up for Rutgers. Just looking at our team coming from training camp, we've met several times, talked several times. It's been a very productive training camp. I've said this before: This is a different football team than what we had last year in a lot of regards. We have different players, we have different coaches with different players. We have certain faces of offense and defenses and special teams where you look on the film from early in last season, we will have completely 11 new different players out there than what would have played in this game a year ago. So excited to watch these guys go out and play. We have transfers, we have freshmen that haven't been around on game day; so excited to see how they go out and handle that moment and that spotlight, so to speak, Friday night, with being on national television. It's a lot of unknowns, also. There's excitement, there's unknowns that we have to see how they handle when we get to game day. But with that, I'll just go ahead and open up to questions. Q. How important is the atmosphere going to be not only from the point of energizing your team but disrupting them? COACH ASH: Well, anytime you go and play a football team, you want a great environment. I don't care who the opponent is. You want to create a home-field advantage, and the fans are a big part of that. I do think, though, having a team like Washington come does excite the fan base. Just excites college football fans in general. To have a team of that calibre, to have the success they had last year coming to town, for a college football fan, you like to go watch a game like that. But home-field advantage is very important, in every single game. Our goal, we talk a lot about this, is being able to create the same type of environment every home game regardless of who we're playing. Q. How do you feel about the quarterback position, specifically Kyle, since you made the decision? COACH ASH: Well, I hope I feel good. I mean, he's our starting quarterback. You know, I would be crazy if I stood up here and told you I don't feel good about my starting quarterback' would probably be a bad thing. Kyle has been very impressive in his short time here. This summer, obviously he got voted as captain and it's because of what he did in the summer and in the early part of training camp, he's provided great leadership. And probably what the coaching staff and the players respect about him more than anything is his work ethic. He has been a relentless worker since he's gotten on campus. He's earned the respect of the players and staff because of that. He's constantly studying the film, constantly talking to other offensive players about what they need to do. Out on the field he's a coach on the field. He can tell basically all the other players where to go, how to line up, what their responsibilities are, and that's pretty special when you have those things. Now he's got to do it on game day. We have no idea how he will handle game day. The good thing is, though, is that he has played on game day and he's played well and he's played in big games before. We're excited to watch him go play and I'm really glad he's here. He's created a great competition at the quarterback position. I think he's elevated the play of others around him and just the leadership and the ethic the kid has demonstrated and brought to our offense has been outstanding so far. Q. How confident are you with the kicking competition -- COACH ASH: When you say kicking competition, what part of it? Q. Field goal? COACH ASH: It has not been finalized yet. Q. Battling -- COACH ASH: It depends on how you look at it. We've got two players that are pretty similar. They have some great kicks, they have some good kicks and they have some bad ones. They have great days. They have bad -- when I say bad; inconsistent days. Neither one of the two place kickers have separated themselves completely yet, and that could be a bad thing. But I look at it as they both have strengths that could help our football team, and by the time we're done with tomorrow's practice, we'll have a starting place kicker named. Q. Harte? COACH ASH: Yes. Justin Davidovicz has won our kickoff position. He will be our kickoff guy. But right now, it's Harte and Bonagura that are battling for the placekicking duties. Bonagura was here last year. Harte was not. He's a newcomer to the mix. Again I like both of them. Just we're looking for the guy that will be the most consistent and neither one of them has necessarily been consistent every single day of training camp. They have done well and they have shown some really good -- they have done some really good things. They have made some really big kicks in critical moments and scrimmages in practice, but it's who is going to be the most consistent. It's almost dead even right now. Q. Going back to Kyle, have you noticed any difference in the week since he's been named the starting quarterback, now that it's getting to be game week, prepping for Washington and have you noticed any increased sense of anything from him? COACH ASH: No. He's pretty consistent. He's the same guy every day. That's what I really like about him. Some of the great quarterbacks that have been around, they are just consistent, never too high, never too low. They just go about doing their business every single day and that's what I like about him. He's been here before and it's not new to him. Sometimes you worry about that when you talk about a first-time player, a new starter, when it actually gets to game week, game prep, what happens to them. Haven't seen any changes in Kyle whatsoever. He's been leading and performing and preparing at a high level ever since he's gotten here. Q. Opening against a ranked team, I know there are drawbacks but what are the positives? Is it a good measuring stick or motivating for the players? COACH ASH: I think all the things you just mentioned. You talk about the long off-season, the long summer workouts, the long training camp, what's a motivating factor for the players to play. Open up against a team like Washington is very motivating especially when you play them last year and the results weren't necessarily what they wanted. They went on and had a great year and we didn't. That's motivation for our whole program, coaches and players alike, to be able to go back out, line up against a team like Washington again and measure yourself. Washington, you know, they are not going to determine the success or failures of our overall season, but to go out there in game one and play them again and measure your football team, the improvement, hopefully that you see, that's a motivating factor for everybody. Q. What do you expect from the strong side linebacker position to look for the opener, which players are you looking at? COACH ASH: Did you say strong side linebacker? Q. For Ross -- COACH ASH: I mean, Ross Douglas is our starting Sam, he has been the whole training camp. Q. Whether it's a short yardage or anything -- COACH ASH: Yeah, all of our players, most of our players, if we're going to rotate or play multiple guys, it's situational. Third-and-long is different than third-and-short and it's different than first down. So we have subpackages, several, where different players can be on the field at different times based on situations. Right now Ross Douglas is our starting outside center liner in certain situations and certain personnel groupings and we'll have others that we'll play based on personnel groupings, also. Q. Is it still ongoing -- COACH ASH: It's still ongoing and probably will be for the majority of at least the start of the season. Anticipate that there's an opportunity for Johnathan and Gio both to play in a game based on the situation. It is a nice luxury to have a backup quarterback that started so many games like Gio has and been in games and done well. Specifically, the Minnesota game last year. So that's a comfort. But we do want to get Johnathan Lewis into games. How much the first game will have to be determined. It won't be a surprise if at some point all three of those guys, not necessarily in one game, but could play throughout the first half of the season, until we really get comfortable with what we're doing. Q. So trying to take advantage of his skill-set, get him some experience -- COACH ASH: It's all of the above. The kid is a talented kid. If you're going to play another quarterback, there's got to be a reason. He's a different skill-set than the other two quarterbacks. We do think he's going to have a chance to be a quarterback for us and we think his skill-set brings a different element to our offense, and if we can take advantage of that and use that, we'll do that. If we don't think it's the right time, we don't. We're not going to force it just to say we're going to but there are opportunities and situations where Johnathan Lewis could help our football team. It might be the first one, might be third or fourth -- depend on quarterback and how they handle game week lineally and being on national television, playing against a really good opponent. We don't know that about Johnathan Lewis yet and we have to go through the week and see how he's doing, before we say, he's going to go in this game or that game. Q. We keep asking this, but we have to do our due diligence, are you confident that Kemoko will be out there on Friday? COACH ASH: I am. It's not 100 percent yet but all indications that he will be. He's not been completely cleared yet so still a slim chance he might not be. He's worked a lot in training camp but just limited here lately. He's feeling pretty good here right now. Just we'll find out tomorrow. Q. The turnover margin, how have you gone about trying to force more turnover keep that as an emphasis throughout training camp? COACH ASH: It's been an emphasis the whole off-season. We talked about Rutgers can't beat Rutgers. We talk about the things you have to do to win games. We talk to the players about how games are lost and how games are won, and a lot of it has to do with the turnover margin. More games are lost because you turn the ball over. We did that too much last year. We did that too much in this game against Washington last year. You look at the final score and you try to figure out why. Well, there's several reasons. One we didn't take care of the football. Two, the kicking game, we gave up explosive plays in the kicking game and some touchdowns. Those two areas right there have a been major emphasis for us since last season. They were an emphasis for us during the season. We've done some different things within the program and our structure of practice and preparation to improve on our ball security, improve on our ability to take the ball away and improve on our kicking game. We're not just going to continue to do the same old thing. We did a lot of research and put a lot of time and effort to try to fix that because that's not a talent thing. We as a staff and as a program are doing more right now on winning the takeaway battle than anywhere I've been in my career, anywhere. It's been a major, major emphasis. Now, will it work? We'll find out when the games start. But I can tell you we have invested the same amount of time on holding on to the ball and take the ball away than anywhere I've been. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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