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STANFORD UNIVERSITY FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

November 25, 2017

David Shaw

Stanford, California

Stanford - 38, Notre Dame - 20

DAVID SHAW: Good to see everybody. Obviously very excited right now. Great to see my family in the back. Hello, everybody. Not to get into specifics, but I know this has been a rough year health-wise in my family.

But helps to keep perspective in this season of Thanksgiving of what you can do when your family stays together, what you can do when your team stays together, when you surround yourself with people that you love, that love you and care about you. Anything's possible.

Now, on the game, in the same mode, we sat here 1-2 with a lot of doubt. Some of it was internal. We had to ask ourselves a lot of questions. We had to change some pieces around on our team. We talked about not worrying about anything else other than playing our style of football, blocking out the noise: Coach Shaw is too conservative. We don't know what we're doing. Defense isn't aggressive enough.

We had to go back and be who we are, hit a groove. Won five straight. Lost a tough game in the snow at Washington State. Came back, more tough questions, difficult week of practice. Came back, won the next two. Good Washington team, tough game against Cal at home.

Came back today, played against a really good Notre Dame team. Might have played our best game of the year. Not perfect, but might have played our best game of the year, complete game, offense, defense, special teams, effort and execution. Not perfect by any stretch. You're going to give up some plays to a good team.

For our players to go from 1-2 to win eight out of nine, get back to the Pac-12 championship game says a lot about who they are, a lot about what we do, a lot about our coaching staff.

Now we have six days to get ready for a good team who is on a bye. We got to take care of ourselves. Got to get some rest, prepare. We still need to practice, put the pads on, do a few things. We got to get our legs back for game 13, Pac-12 championship game.

This game, defensively second half, just awesome. We gave up one big play. Wish it wouldn't have happened. It almost, like, settled us down. Our guys were great on the sidelines, fought back, played great the rest of the half. Turnovers, played physical, played smart, made big tackles, big plays, deflected passes.

Offensively you run out of words for what Bryce Love is. 130 yards on a sprained ankle. I mean, he's been in pain for a month. Now we're with the doctors, with the trainers all the time, trying to make sure we're not doing any permanent damage. It's pain tolerance, it's unbelievable. 130 yards, 20 carries, with a smile on his face.

It's not about winning awards, it's not being an All-American, it's not because the game is on national TV. He just loves to play. He loves his teammates. If he can be out there, he wants to be out there. It's awesome.

Our young quarterback, we put a lot on his shoulders this game. 90% of the plays we ran tonight were on his shoulders. We called three plays in the huddle. At the line of scrimmage, had to pick the right play, step up in the pocket, make successful big-time throws. He did that tonight.

Proud of our football team. Proud of the our preparation. Proud of the fact that the guys believed in each other, never stopped working, never stopped fighting. Proud of my coaching staff, for working together, working through a lot of adversity, making some tough decision s on personnel, offense and defense, coming back and finding a way to be where we are right now with a big-time game ahead of us in six days. Couldn't be more proud.

Questions.

Q. Your players obviously stayed focused on this game. Did they actually get a lift from what was going on in Seattle?
DAVID SHAW: I have no idea. I know they announced the score a couple times. This Notre Dame team is so dangerous, we were focused completely on this game. There's nothing we could do about what was happening in the Apple Cup. It's nice they announced the score a couple times. People cheered, so I guess that Washington was ahead. Our guys were completely focused on what they had to do on our field.

Q. You talked about K.J.'s poise and playing calling. What else struck you about his game?
DAVID SHAW: The competitor that he is. He'll sit here and tell you he should have had five touchdown passes. For a young quarterback in this kind of environment, some of those -- the pocket wasn't perfect. These guys are good. They're good pass-rushers. They edged a couple times. He got hit a couple times. To push up in the pocket, that rocket he threw back in the end zone, the ball hit through to Trenton, had to go over a guy, get back down into Trenton's hands. Giving J.J. a chance with a guy in his face. Backing up, flicked it with his wrist. You can't say enough about the ceiling that this kid has.

Love the fact that he stays humble, just goes back to work. Really, really is taking the next step now. Going to be about seven to 10 plays we have to talk about that need to be better. For a redshirt freshman, he's doing really well. I'm really excited about where he's headed.

Q. Joey Alfieri and Cotton go down, talk about the play of the guys who stepped up. Jovan Swann, Curtis Robinson and others. And then the turnover cost.
DAVID SHAW: It's been a priority for us, really for years, to be honest with you, just hadn't gotten the done. The last four years, up until this year, we were getting takeaways. We got really good athletes in the back end. The play that Frank made is a huge play, huge play. Kind of knew where the ball was going. Kind of stayed in the middle of the field. As soon as the quarterback kind of pumped, he ran full speed, got over there in time.

There were multiple guys. Looked like the ball was about to be caught. Three that I'm counting off the top of my head. Stumbled on a kickoff cover. We emphasized it so much. The guys take so much pride in it. It's great to see it come to fruition because it changed the game obviously.

This was a back-and-forth game. Became a two-score game because of turnovers. We can force turnovers, not give the ball away on offense, I mean, not just us, anybody, you're tough to beat. If we can run the ball like we did, use the passing game like we did, play great defense, great special teams, get turnovers, we're a tough team to beat.

Q. What adjustments did you make or how did you settle your defense down after they hit you with those two big plays?
DAVID SHAW: You know, so much of defense is mentality, right? You have to recognize the talent on the other side. We recruited Equanimeous. We knew he's a talented son of a gun. Saw it on film. Weren't sure he was going to play. Find out he's going to play. He's a guy that you circle because he can make big plays. He ran full speed and cramped the back end, great block on the sidelines.

But our guys are great at bouncing back, obviously. Great at bouncing back. Great at trusting our scheme and trusting each other and playing hard, knowing that we're going to have a chance to get that back.

After that we got some turnovers, great stands on third down. Give a lot of credit to the coaching staff that our players are really coming and playing hard.

Q. Obviously K.J. wasn't the quarterback the last time you faced the Trojans. How are you a better football team or are you this time around?
DAVID SHAW: That's a great question. I have no idea. We're scrappy. I think we played well in that game against USC, I really do. Keller Chryst played well in that game. We didn't protect him very well.

I thought they played lights out. They were phenomenal. Quarterback was great. Receivers were great. They were awesome up front, defensive line-wise. It was tough on us to find lanes. Bryce hit a few, broke out a couple of them.

I think we're just more weathered. I think both teams are tired. Someone asked me if we won this game, Washington State didn't beat Washington, was it kind of fair that USC had a bye. I said, Yeah, they just went 12 straight. They survived 12 straight and won the South. They deserve to have a bye. So there's no issue with that whatsoever.

We've got to be smart about what we do this week. We've got to get our legs back in a short week and really still have a chance to game plan and practice and get good at some things in order to have a chance to be successful.

Q. Speaking of the USC game, you gave up 49 points. It's now 10 straight games that you've held an opponent under its scoring average. Talk about Lance Anderson, what he's able to do, the group surviving the injuries they've had?
DAVID SHAW: It was only 49 points when we played SC? Felt like a lot more.

Pride. There's a lot of pride on our defensive side. A lot of pride in our coaching staff. A lot of pride in our players, in particular our seniors, our captains. Justin Reed, Harrison Phillips, Bobby Okereke is playing so well. Jordan Perez playing on the wrong side. We've got guys get banged up, dinged up, had to move guys through, rotate guys through. Moving Joe out there was great outside. When he gets banged up, Curtis Robinson comes up with one of the plays of the game. Guys keep scrapping, keep fighting.

That's the key for us. We can't relax. We can't rest. We can't think that we're great now, we're going to just show up against USC. We'll get destroyed if we don't play our best game. That's on film. We've seen that. We have to prepare ourselves to play with our heads down and give it our best shot, play the best game we can possibly play.

Q. When the Huskies were in command of their game in the third quarter, did you consider taking Bryce out at that point?
DAVID SHAW: I didn't know the Huskies were in command. Only thing I knew what was happening on our field. We mixed Bryce in and out quite a bit. We rolled Trevor through. We rolled Cam Scarlett through. Put Danny Marx in the past a couple times. We were trying to take care of him.

He still had some juice at the end of the game. He still made two big runs at the end of the game where he's breaking tackles. He almost scored twice. It's not like he was hobbled. It's sore and painful. He didn't reinjure it, so he felt fine. We got to the point with a three-score lead at the end of the game to take him out, he wasn't going back in. It had nothing to do with the Washington game, it had everything to do with the game we were playing.

Q. Your key to Wimbush? He had the big scoring throws. Pretty much kept him under control for most of the game.
DAVID SHAW: So I'm a big fan of knowing yourself. One of my issues, to be honest with you, is I'm very subtle at times. I was not subtle this week about containing the quarterback. We had to keep him inside. It was about three times tonight where he started to go outside. You saw one if not two guys running out to put him back inside. It was a huge key.

If he ran up the middle, he was going to get yards, we were going to get him on the ground. Get that guy to a sideline, he's going to kill us either with his legs or his arm. Multiple times we got a chance to contain him, bring him back inside. Only chance we had. He's such a great athlete outside the pocket.

Thank you.

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