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RUTGERS UNIVERSITY FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCESeptember 1, 2018Chris AshPiscataway, New Jersey Texas State - 7, Rutgers - 35 CHRIS ASH: Appreciate you guys coming back. Obviously it's great to be 1-0. It's been three years to get there. But opening the season 1-0 is great. Great feeling. Very happy for our players, happy for our staff, our fans, supporters that came out today. Love the student section. Really appreciate the students showing up today. We haven't started class yet. We had a great student section, they were in to it. They created an energy and enthusiasm in that stadium that we need every single Saturday. Appreciate those guys. Great to get the victory. As I told the team at halftime, it was a sloppy victory. Too many penalties, too many mistakes. The good thing is we played a lot of young players. I think I was told 15 freshmen, redshirt freshmen played today. Some were in critical positions. They made some mistakes. It was good to make those mistakes, get some game reps under their belt, still come out with a victory. It will help them in the long run. Injury wise you saw Tijuan Mason. They are looking at him. I think he has a fracture, that will be a long-term injury. Other than that, I think we are pretty good. There were some minor things that we just were using precaution on with guys like Bless and Tre Avery, who did not play today. Same thing. Nothing long-term that we know of right now. If something changes, like always, I'll tell you guys an Monday. With that, I'll open it up for questions. Q. Initial impressions on Art? CHRIS ASH: I think Art did a really good job for a true freshman playing quarterback in his first game. It's been a while since he played in a game. Some of the things we were concerned about, how is he going to handle contact, he did that. How is he going to handle negative plays. He did that. Not all the negative plays were his doing. There were some things that other guys on offense needed to do and didn't. Overall I'm pleased with what Art did. He's got to get better. He will get better after this game. But very pleased. Q. How close were you after that interception, he came back about 30 yards, two first downs, how impressed were you he recovered? CHRIS ASH: That was a big unknown with Art. How is he going to respond to negative plays. He's very hard on himself, he has a lot of pride. Takes a lot of pride in his performance, wants to be perfect. We knew true freshman playing in his first game, he wasn't going to be perfect. But he responded well. He did it a couple times. Very pleased with that. He'll learn from the film. He's probably watching it now, to be honest with you. That's just the way he is. He'll learn from it. He'll get better from it, move forward. Q. Impressive also is his willingness to take a big hit. Is that something you expected, were worried? CHRIS ASH: Yeah, absolutely. We haven't had him in any live reps. We were worried about how he would respond to contact. We don't want our quarterback to get touched. We got to protect the quarterback better. He did stand in the pocket with some pressure, delivered the football, took some hits. He needed that. We needed to see him do that. Didn't want him obviously to get hurt. We needed to see him get hurt a little bit, he did that, responded well. Early in the game he scrambled, slid down, got hit in the head. I was a little bit worried about him. He shook it off. Didn't want to come out, kept going. Showed some toughness, definitely. Q. Obviously got the win. 75 offensive plays. A lot of plays. CHRIS ASH: Yeah, offensively with the stats in the second half, it looks like we ran the ball well, had good balance. I think over 200 yards passing, over 200 yards rushing. We'd love to have that balance each week. We're going to have to do a lot of things better, though. A lot of plays we left out there. Whether we had a bust in protection, someone didn't run a route the right way. Typical first game issues with some young players that we have to get cleaned up and fixed. But I was pleased offensively with our ability to move the ball and stay balanced. We'll watch the tape and see what else we have to clean up. Number one thing is the penalties. Had a touchdown taken off the board because of a presnap penalty, alignment issue. We can't afford to do that against good teams we'll be playing down the road. Q. What did Jonathan Hilliman show you? CHRIS ASH: He runs the ball hard. He's a bigger back. That's definitely where we want him to excel, is in short yardage, goal line situations. He was able to move the sticks a couple times today. He runs the ball hard. I think with Blackshear, Hilliman, you look at what Isiah Pacheco did at the end, I really like. Trey Sneed also. I really like our runningback group. We have speed, we have power, we have small, we got big. We got a good combination of all of it. They got to push each other to keep getting better. We're going to rely on them to do a lot of things. You could see some of those guys all over the field, whether it is in the backfield or spread out. They were all over special teams. It's a really good unit. We're going to lean on them a lot. Q. A lot of mistakes on special teams, seemed pretty widespread. Do you attribute that to young players? A major concern? CHRIS ASH: It's the first game. We told the team, usually where a lot of first game mistakes come are on the special teams. Again, NFL, college football, that's usually the case. We were hoping that would not be the case. Some of them were foolish penalties that we'll get cleaned up. The running into the kicker should not have happened. We got a personal foul on hitting the punt snapper before he got up, was able to run down the field. I think they said you have to have a second in between the time he snaps, starts to take off. I don't know how you snap the ball and not take off without it being a second. They said it was. So it was a penalty. There are some things we can get cleaned up relatively easy that I'm not concerned about. There's some other things we can get cleaned up. We have to put a lot of time and effort into it to get it done. Q. (Question about Avery.) CHRIS ASH: I think Avery did a great job. To go in at a true freshman, play corner, we put him back there to return punts. Took a big hit. Signaled fair catch. Caught the ball, took a big hit. The other one he caught the ball late in the game. He was all over the field as a true freshman. Absolutely love the kid. You talk about an A plus individual, he's got it all. He's going to be a star here, and really fired up for him, what he did today in his first game. Q. Talk about defensive line, gap discipline, linebackers. CHRIS ASH: For the most part defensively I thought we played fairly clean. We had some penalties early in the game, especially in the first drive, that extended some plays. I think we had a pass interference call. We had another defensive penalty. We had a special teams penalty that kept the drive alive, gave them some cheap yards that we don't want. Overall, especially in some critical situations, they were getting in potential scoring positions, we bowed our neck, got some TFLs, made some plays we needed to keep points off the board. I'm really pleased with what we did. Again, I have to evaluate the film, look at some things we got to do better. Obviously we need to get after the quarterback. I think we put some pressure on the quarterback today. We need to put more on the quarterback. We got some takeaways today. Scored on defense. There were a lot of things I think we'll be pleased about, but still several areas we're going to have to improve in, especially with our depth. We have a bunch of young players backing guys up. We're going to have to keep playing, keep working with them, bringing them along. Thankfully a lot of those guys got opportunities today. Q. (Question about touching the ball 22 times.) CHRIS ASH: I think it's a great number, to be honest with you. We need to be able to spread the ball around. I think we have several play-makers on the offensive side of the ball. Raheem is obviously a little bit different from a skill set than a lot of the guys that we have. We got to get the ball to our tight ends. I think you saw Daevon Robinson catch a pass late in the game, show a burst of explosion and some speed there. We have to get him involved. Travis Vokolek, some of the other receivers. I think we spread it around more to receivers today more today than we did any time last year. I was pleased with that. 22 touches, that's a good amount for one individual, especially playing runningback and wide receiver like we had him doing today. We got to get the ball in more guys' hands. Q. (Indiscernible.) CHRIS ASH: He was banged up. He could have went today if it was an emergency. We wanted to save him. Q. How about the run game? How important is it to take the load off of a true freshman quarterback? CHRIS ASH: It's very important. We have to be able to run the football. If we can do that successfully, we'll open up the pass game. I think you saw Art back there today make some really good throws. He wasn't perfect, but he made some really good throws. If we can run the ball effectively, it's going to help the pass game a lot more. That's definitely what we have to do. Until he really gets comfortable and feels good with where he's at, we're going to rely on those other guys a lot more. That was the conversation before the game started. Don't try to do too much, don't try to force the ball, put the ball in the play-makers' hands, let other guys make plays. Don't try to go win the game for us. I think he did a pretty good job of that. Again, we'll watch the tape and see other areas he has to improve on. Q. What gave you and your staff to play Eddie Lewis' number today? CHRIS ASH: Just what he's done in practice. He's been here since January. He's been really consistent. He showed some real flash of ability in practice. He's done a great job of learning his playbook. The kid has worked really hard. I'm excited about his future here. To see him get out there today in his first football game, make some plays, he'll have a chance just to continue to improve. Hopefully we're talking about him a lot here as we go down the rest of the season. Q. Did you change anything protection-wise? CHRIS ASH: No. It's called fundamentals. That's it. Guys got to work their fundamentals, execute their assignments. There was no need to change anything. Calls are calls. We have to execute them. We got to know what we're doing in the calls, use the proper fundamentals with the right effort. That's really what it comes down to. Every now and then, just like anything, there's a strength and weakness to every protection you have. You want to minimize your weaknesses. They get the perfect call against the perfect protection, they're going to win unless we side adjust and Art gets rid of the ball. There's a number of things. Not just protection. It's the quarterback's ability to throw the ball hot, and the receiver or tight end ability to run the right route based on what they're seeing. There's a lot to go into it, but it's more about fundamental and technique. Q. Cole's health? CHRIS ASH: I'm not concerned. He was banged up in training camp. Here in the last few days, he's really taken a big jump forward. He's limped around because it was hot, played a lot of plays, 320 pounds. He's going to be fine down the road. The kid is a senior, a captain. He's done an unbelievable job leading the offensive line and the offense, just this football team in general. It's going to take a lot for him not to be out there today. We really had conversations about not doing it. But he was going to have nothing to do with that. He was going to go play. Really proud of him. I couldn't sit here and honestly tell you how well he played or the mistakes he made until we watch the film. Very proud of him to go out there and play the complete game like he did. Thank you, guys. Take care. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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