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STANFORD UNIVERSITY FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCENovember 10, 2017David ShawStanford, California Stanford - 30, Washington - 22 DAVID SHAW: First of all, really challenged our offensive line this game. Washington's got an outstanding defense with Vita Vea who I think is, I mean outside of maybe Justin Reid, best player on the defense that we have seen. So we challenged our guys up front. Run and pass. To give it their best effort. I thought they did that tonight. Very proud of K.J. Costello. Coming in in a tough situation. Back-to-back games as a red-shirt freshman, facing the top two defenses in the conference. Played okay last week, not great, a lot of things went wrong around him, including yours truly. And then came in today fired up, ready to go, made some big time throws. J.J. was phenomenal tonight as well. Defensively -- before I leave the offense, Mike Bloomgren has done such a phenomenal job really over the last seven years with different lineups and getting young guys in there ready to play and having injuries and etcetera. And some of the guys are still playing banged up, but Mike did a great job preparing for a great defense. Lance Anderson, I mean year after year doesn't get enough credit for what he does with our defensive personnel. And switching things up. Second half, it was about as good as we have played as a unit defensively. The guys knew what to do, they did it fast. Early on, they got after us early on, we had to make a couple subtle adjustments and we just had to settle them down. We gave them some things that we shouldn't have given them, but they're good enough to take advantage. Peter Alamar, special teams coordinator, to come in and know that we have got an outstanding punt returner against us tonight, Dante Pettis is phenomenal, is a record breaker, devised a plan to try to neutralize him and the guys went out there and executed. So all three coordinators did an outstanding job. The guys played extremely well. Oh, and then there's Bryce Love. On the one leg, 30 carries, 170 yards, and three touchdowns. Give me a break. His pain tolerance is through the roof. We had to keep checking him just to make sure that he was okay, to make sure that he was functional, because he'll never say that he's not going to play. He'll give it all that he's got. We had to re-tape him a couple times, crazy things happen in piles, got twisted up and tangled up, that's just what happens in football. Re-taped it so he could get back on his toes, he could explode, he could push off, testing him make sure he was okay and he was and he goes out there from start to finish and pours his heart out for his teammates. I don't know if you can ask anything more of a football player. I don't know if you can find a better football player in America than Bryce Love and that's BryceLove20.com. Questions? Q. You've had a Rose Bowl win and several other very big wins over your career here -- DAVID SHAW: Two Rose Bowl wins, but that's okay. Q. Okay. Two. I'm sorry. DAVID SHAW: Thank you. Q. But is this the -- considering who you were playing here, is this the biggest win of your career? DAVID SHAW: No. It's a great win. It's a good team win. That's, I think that's too much to put on a regular season game. I think our first Rose Bowl, our first PAC-12 championship game, because here's how I measure things like that is much like this past week, people have put us on a scrap heap, on average once a year, typically. And our guys don't believe it, they don't buy into it, they fight back. So coming back off of tough games and coming back and winning, coming back -- Kevin Hogan coming back as a red-shirt freshman to lead us on an unbelievable run to win a Rose Bowl was unbelievable. PAC-12 championship game with against Arizona State was unreal. The way we played up front, Ryan Hewitt made some unbelievable plays, Tyler Gaffney took the game over. So many great games. This was a good game and many of you heard me say this before, there are no upsets in our conference. There aren't any. It's too tight. It's too close. There's too many good football teams. Anybody can beat anybody. The outsider rankings and CFP rankings and all this stuff, that stuff doesn't matter. It is hard to win on the road in this conference. Things are better at home and teams are good. And you get good quarterback play like we got tonight, you play well and you run the ball and you got an outstanding player at all levels on the offense and defense, the way Harrison played. Bobby Okereke, I don't know who is playing better at linebacker the second half of the season than Bobby. Bobby's been outstanding. And then what we did at the back end, missing Alijah Holder. Some tough downs against a great quarterback that's hard to get down on the ground. But the way our guys battled I think was outstanding. I think this is one of many good wins. Q. Has Bryce Love had a full practice this month? DAVID SHAW: No. Q. What about Bobby Okereke? He's had a really good season, but in this game 11 tackles, two sacks? DAVID SHAW: For me it's been the last month for Bobby. The last five games really. He's really started to take his game up to another notch. He's seeing the game quicker. He played really well early in the year, but he was still reacting. Now he's anticipating and that's a huge difference, because he's got speed, length, athleticism, and now he's feeling the game and making some unbelievable plays. Some of the plays he made tonight should have been four- or five-yard games, but he saw them early and they ended up being two-yard gains or a couple of losses, actually. You combine that with what Harrison is doing up front physically and Justin Reid and Meeks are doing in the back end, to have really good players at all three levels of the defense makes a win like this tonight possible. Q. What does it do for the offense when K.J. hits those deep passes early in terms of loosening things up on their defense? DAVID SHAW: Outstanding coaching by me. Which is hit him with the ball. Guys open give him a chance to make plays. To be honest, that was my lament last week, honestly. J.J.'s got one-on-one coverage. We didn't take enough opportunities, advantage of that, against Washington State. I put that completely on myself. We have got really good receivers. I think we were a little too conservative. The snow didn't affect anything last night or last week, but we have to mix it up. And we mixed it up today, K.J., once again, wasn't perfect, he's young he missed a couple, but when the money was on the line, when it was on the line, he made the plays. He's excitable, he can scramble for positive plays, made some down the field throws, made some tight window throws. Those throws inside were very, very tight windows and he put it right on our guys. So those were big. Q. The tempo seemed -- on the first couple drives the tempo they played with seemed to bother the defense. What did you guys do to, you talked about some alterations, but what were you able to do to change that? DAVID SHAW: The big thing with the tempo is it happened after big plays. So when we slowed down the big plays there wasn't as much tempo. But when they get into that tempo, it's tough. You got to get the calls in quickly, they're very aggressive, you got to grade for run and pass, because they will go big play and then line up and run another pass down the field. So everybody's got to get set, get the call. But, thankfully, the defensively, we didn't give up as many big plays in the second half and we were able to play our defense. Q. When Bryce first came out, when he got tweaked the ankle, did you think he would be able to play again? And what happened between then and the third quarter when it look like he was sort of reborn? DAVID SHAW: I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure. The word that I got was that he wasn't in anymore pain, he just needed to be re-taped. Once he got re-taped he could still plant on it, he could still push off of it. Bryce is a tough one. It's hard to -- you can ask him if it hurts, because he says it's okay. How bad does it hurt? He says no, it's okay. On a scale of one to ten, he'll never say ten, he'll always say like three. So we have to make sure that it's functional. Can he push off, get on his toes, can he cut. So every time we had to re-tape him we had to make sure he could still do the right things. And if he couldn't then we wouldn't play him. But he could, so we went out there and it was just outstanding. Q. Washington had eight yards a play in the first half. And in the second half it was 3.5 and this isn't the first time Lance Anderson has done that to an offense. Can you just shed a little light on what is happening at halftime? DAVID SHAW: Well, first of all, there were some miscues and Jake Browning takes advantage of miscues. He's not a bright, he's a brilliant quarterback. He's able to scramble around and I'm not kidding, those were Fran Tarkenton-type plays, for those that are old enough to know who that is. To run around and find a window, step in, keep those guys off balance. And knowing that it's him against 300 pounders that are trying to catch him, he gets them tired a little bit and then keeps his eyes down the field and makes some big plays. So some of them were him. Twice we lost the edge defensively. We didn't keep our arm free outside and they got around the edge. Myles Gaskin is probably the most underrated running back in our conference. Nobody ever mentions him, but he's one of those guys too. He's quick and explosive and he got around and hurt us a couple times. Had a 18 yard gain. Second half we settled everybody down, got everybody to do their jobs, stay where you're supposed to stay, and then have guys make plays. We made a couple of plays up front on our defensive line, had a couple of plays at linebacker, and the a couple in particular that Bobby made, and we were able to slow them down. And once we could slow them down and not give up the big chunks, make them try to go the long way, run some clock, especially when we had the lead, we have a chance to win. Q. And then did you guys do a little bit more from under center tonight than you have this season? Was that Washington specific? DAVID SHAW: It was a little bit of a change-up on some of our run plays in particular and then we threw a couple play action and naked movements from under center. But it was just a game plan thing. Game plan adjustment for us. Not that big of a change. Q. Getting off the field on third down has been a problem at times for the defense this season. Washington delivered a couple gut punch moments in that first half, completely different after that. If you could talk about third down specifically for the defense. DAVID SHAW: Well, as many of you know, I'm a NFL-trained guy. I love college football, I want to stay in college football for a long time, but the training that I got from John Gruden, which sometimes you can tell, sometimes you can't, but it's all about first down efficiency, it's about third down efficiency, it's about red zone touchdown percentage. I mean that's the game. And honestly, we haven't been good enough on third down offensively or defensively. The games that we have been good, with the games that we convert third downs and the games that we have been good we stop people on third down. So tonight for them to be 2-8 on third down, for us to be 10-18, that's outstanding. That's huge. That's guys coming in, making plays in the passing game, couple of audibles that K.J. had to get to to run the ball, one was to run the ball one was to pass the ball and convert those first downs. Q. And last thing, I was given the context of you were without Walker Little, Connor Wedington goes down, and everything else kind of going on with the offense. This defense hadn't given up this many points since 2015. If you could talk about their ability to rise to this occasion. DAVID SHAW: It's huge. Because two things: Actually, it's more than two. It's so many things. This was a great team win. We played really well up front. Denver Hamilton came in there and didn't miss a beat. Played extremely well. We were able to run the football and you got a phenomenal player in Bryce Love, which we know if he gets the ball enough, he's going to break one or two. And he broke a couple tonight that looked like they were going to be short gains and he stepped out of a couple tackles and made them into longer gains. Quarterback play, we got to hit the throws that are there and missed a couple, but came back and made some big ones. Made some big ones to J.J., made some big ones on third downs, scrambled when he needed to. And then I can't say enough about J.J. J.J.'s been really good all year and with limited opportunities. And sometimes we have not taken enough shots with him, he's not just a deep ball guy, he's a very good receiver, he caught a couple of slants today, as well as some deep passes. So the combination of all of those things, when all of those things are working together for anybody, you're tough to beat, but in particular for us, when we can play that way and play the style of defense, we have a chance to win every week. Q. Is this the best combination kickoff, punt, field goal kicker you've had here at Stanford? DAVID SHAW: That's a tough one. That's a tough one. When we're right, it's really close. Jake Bailey has kind of been on a tear. As a punter, he's been unbelievable. What he did last week in the snow, pinning the Washington State back in the kickoffs were unreal. Tonight on kind of a slick field still he was able to make sure he got his plant leg and be smooth through the ball and I don't know how many touchbacks he had tonight. Was outstanding against a team that has a history of returns. They have always been good with returns, but particularly tonight with a couple of dynamic returners, that was huge. Punts and kickoffs were huge. I wish we could have nailed that last field goal to give us a little bit more breathing room, but Jet's been really good all year. Q. You have been very vocal this year in defending some of the most marginal targeting calls. Two targeting calls that were overruled tonight against Washington. The first one, I'm sorry I've got to ask the question, coach -- DAVID SHAW: (Banging head against microphone.) Q. -- the first one you seemed very upset about. Wedington had to leave the game. What was your reaction to that play, that call reversal? DAVID SHAW: Your observation of my reaction was very astute. We had some conversations on the sideline. I'll say this and I better not get fined for it. I know I won't, because I'm just speaking the truth here. We have talked a lot in college football about protecting our athletes, our student athletes. I was a big part of changing the rule last year. Rogers Redding was here tonight, we reminisced about it. David Coleman, PAC-12 head of officiating, he was here tonight. We talked about it so much. After helping re-shape the rule and having constant and continual conversations about it, I'm now confused again. I'm now confused again. I'm not sure what the rule is. And I need to be re-educated, because I thought I knew, I thought I was probably one of the top four or five guys as far as understanding what was going to be called and what was not going to be called. So I need it see the replays, we'll have multiple conversations this week, but I need to understand exactly what is going to be called on review and what's not going to be called, because I'm not really sure right now. Q. Was there a point this week when you saw this coming and if so, when was it? DAVID SHAW: I'm an eternal optimist. I always see this coming. But to be honest, the bottom line for me is to put together a plan that we could operate, that we could orchestrate, that K.J. could manage, that put our guys in position to make plays. J.J., Trenton, we put Kaden in some positions, didn't get as many opportunities tonight. Connor got a couple of shots. Donald Stewart was, got a ball deflected, he had a couple opportunities that ball didn't go his way necessarily. But, passing game wise, I wanted to make sure it was something we could go out there and orchestrate against a team that they mix it up. It's all three deep. Oh, but it's three cloud. Now it's weak rotation. Now strong rotation. Now a zone blitz. Now it's drop 8. We had to be very, very specific to what we told K.J. to make sure he was going through his progressions, we used some play action pass, probably more this game than we have all year in order to try to get them to suck up a little bit and we could find lines, and K.J. did a great job there. And then we were hoping that Bryce was going to be healthy enough and strong enough to last the game for us, because if he's given enough opportunities against anybody in the nation, he's going to find a way to make a play. So now we got to throw him back in the training room and get him iced up and rehabbed for a game thankfully eight days from now. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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