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BOSTON COLLEGE FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

September 3, 2018

Steve Addazio

Boston, Massachusetts

STEVE ADDAZIO: All right, guys. Appreciate you all coming out here on Labor Day. Week 2, college football season. Excited to get going in week 2, a chance to bring our team to 2-0, playing Holy Cross, a traditional rival game back in the day for Boston College. Certainly another geographical game where there's great fan interest. Speaking of which, I want to thank our fans and our students for their support last week. It was fantastic. We're looking for another great opportunity to see our fans and our students out again this week.

Holy Cross came off a game against Colgate last week. I've had a chance to interact with the head coach there, and I think just a really classy guy, did an unbelievable job here at Assumption, and I think is a heck of a football coach, so I know that he will have his team prepared. We're looking forward towards that match-up on Saturday.

I felt that our team improved in the areas that we really wanted to improve upon, and we want to continue to do that this week. I thought Anthony Brown came out and played with great confidence, which was a real important thing to see in week 1 for him. He ran the team well. He threw the ball well. He handled all the mental checks within the game and was a great leader on the field.

So I'm looking forward to his continued improvement as well as everybody else. I thought we played with effort, toughness and great demeanor on the field on Saturday.

We'll be in a situation this week back into a normal game routine. We met with them yesterday, covered the film, went out on the field. Today is a player day off, and tomorrow we'll resume our Tuesday practice of game week.

Any questions you have, I'll be happy to answer them.

Q. Just what you were saying about Anthony, kind of putting aside his athleticism, how is he as a field manager, managing a game?
STEVE ADDAZIO: Great. I mean, he handled everything. He didn't have any mistakes or miscues with any of the checks or getting -- he's helping people get lined up. I thought our tempo was good. We ran 57 plays in the first half. That's about as good as you're going to do. Second half we had a lot of disruption with substitutions that really wasn't relevant, but we had 57 plays in the first half. I thought we ran pretty efficiently and pretty effectively at a good pace.

Q. Did you give him a little license to call his own plays, too?
STEVE ADDAZIO: No, but I'm not sure that that's not something we'd be close to. I just don't think -- that's not where we are today. But certainly as he grows and matures, there's the possibility for those things. He does have some ability and opportunity to change some routes based off of coverages, and he's capable of that, but we're not really there right now, not yet.

Q. Question on the tight ends. You think of Tommy Swinney, but Ray Martin, Long, just talk about the backup tight ends.
STEVE ADDAZIO: Well, we play with two on every snap, right, so on the field at any one time, there's going to be two, possibly three. But I thought all the tight ends contributed, and all of them did some really good things. Ray happened to have some nice catches, which was good for Ray, but they all had some stuff. Hunter Long had a ball, and I think Korab Idrizi had a ball and Ray and Garrison had a ball. It was a good day for the tight ends. But they're featured in our offense, so you're going to see them involved heavily all the time. That's not like a new phenomenon; that's who we are.

Q. The defense got after it pretty good last week, tackled pretty aggressively, hawking the ball in the secondary. How are you going to balance being aggressive versus trying to play a little bit further back and get into coverages as opposed to getting after it?
STEVE ADDAZIO: Well, I think at the end of the game, we were sort of backing them off a little bit, you know, just saying, hey, let's not get anybody behind us at the end of the game. But I think we're going to play aggressively. We have veteran safeties, a veteran corner, and they're competitive guys. We're going to be aggressive in everything we do. I think there's a time and place for each I guess is what I would say to that, yeah.

Q. You had four drives, 70 more yards on the offense for the first half. Is there almost a rhythm to that?
STEVE ADDAZIO: Well, there was on Saturday, and we'd like there to be continually like that. We all know that that's not always the case, especially in the league that we play and the defenses that we're going to see, but that's the plan, so to speak. The plan is to get 1st downs, get the defense on the field, and play in tempo and fatigue the defense and make them stay on the field with us and not substitute. That's the plan. And like I said, if you don't get a couple of 1st downs, sometimes that doesn't happen. That's why to me it's so critical -- I know it is for any offense. It's not like this is some phenomenon, but I think in our style, getting a couple of 1st downs is really significant for us because then we're moving pretty good. And if you're off the field, then you're putting your defense on the field pretty quickly.

You'd like to avoid that, but it's going to happen from time to time.

Q. What did you see out of Brandon Sebastian on Saturday? He had that (indiscernible) early, but he was able to rebound (indiscernible)?
STEVE ADDAZIO: I mean, he's a young guy, and those are things that are going to happen. When you first -- you're coming out into a major college game, and no matter how talented you are, now matter how well-prepared you are for anybody, you see some different things happen on that field with guys that haven't played a lot before, and it's pretty common. It's like, oh, my God, how did that happen, what happened there? Like what? All of a sudden you don't see it in practice, all camp, and it just shows up. And I just think if you've played the game, you know that especially on big stages like that, stuff happens.

I'll never forget one time I was in the USFL, and I had a great preseason camp, so I remember the line coach said, listen, you're going to make this team. You're sure you need to play in this preseason game, blah blah blah, I'm like, yeah, I'm playing, are you kidding me. So I remember we were playing the Houston Gamblers in Jacksonville in the stadium -- I played at a small Division II school, and the stadium was just on fire. It was sold out. The Pointer Sisters were playing. I could hear pregame and the whole stadium was vibrating, right? And so I remember we had this meeting, and the line coach said -- it was a certain play we had; he said, listen, you can go through - I was on the offensive line - or you can go around to get him. I want you to go around. If you go through, you're on your own. What do I do in that game? For some reason I decide I'm going to go through the guy to get the linebacker. Well, I missed him, and he came up and he hit the back in the backfield. We don't score, it's all on TV, the whole thing. It's all my fault. And I say to myself, oh, this isn't good. Sure enough, I got cut on Monday.

I laugh to myself because -- what possessed me to do that? Honestly, I think it was like just the whole thing. It was big. You know, and I hadn't been in that environment before, and I just made a bad decision. That's a long story now, just to tell you that. It happens, okay. And it happened.

So that's why your goal is to get your young guys in the game with this new redshirt rule. You're giving guys a chance to get in the game, experience some of this stuff, so that later on when you need them or continually if you need them, they grow with that experience. There's no substitute for it. Sorry I just dribbled on.

Q. I know back there on Media Day you talked about how when you were in college playing, the BC-Holy Cross game was always a big event. Do you have any personal memories from that, things that stuck out?
STEVE ADDAZIO: I do. I can't give you specifics, but I can remember this as clear as a bell. We're driving up with a bunch of my buddies. We're going to go up to L.L. Bean, but our tradition was we'd stop and see BC play Holy Cross. This particular game was at Holy Cross. I think it was the game where Doug Flutie -- where he went and got the Heisman right after that game, I think. I'm not 100 percent sure about that. But I remember going into the stadium at Holy Cross, and to me, it was like -- it may have been, may not have been, but to me it was this like huge big-time college football environment. It was a cold fall day and everything smelled of cigar smoke, the hot dogs, the whole bit. We'd go in there like wow, this is awesome, and go watch that game. It was big-time, Northeast New England college football. It was fun. You know, so we -- a couple of different occasions we did that. I do remember that like -- being in Holy Cross stadium and actually feeling the cold and the whole bit and the game and the big-time atmosphere, I remember that very vividly.

Now, ask me about what year exactly that probably was -- what year did Doug get the Heisman? It was '80 what? '84? So it was pre-Doug then. This would have been like '81 maybe. This was probably '81. That's what I'd say. '80, '81, somewhere in there.

Q. Did you ever get a chance to see it when it was at Fenway Park up this way, too?
STEVE ADDAZIO: No, no. I remember being at Holy Cross seeing that game there, yeah.

Q. Because of the short week, are you doing any advance Wake stuff?
STEVE ADDAZIO: You know, we really try to do right now -- we've got to get our game plan solidified here for Holy Cross. I still have that mindset of -- and I think it's important, that we're playing a traditional rival game. We're playing a really good football program. We need to get better. We need to improve. There's areas we need to focus on. Players and coaches all have to be focused right now on Holy Cross. It's all hands on deck.

College football is a funny deal, man; it's really hard to execute at a high level and win a major college football game. There's a lot of different pieces and parts and different people's mentalities, and my job is to make sure that we're locked in, focused and prepared for this game at hand on Saturday, and that's what we're going to do, and then we're going to have to deal with what's next when we get there.

Q. Coming off that -- especially going up against an FCS opponent, what kind of things do you have to do to make sure they are focused?
STEVE ADDAZIO: Well, our guys -- the beauty of coaching at Boston College is you're dealing with some really mature young guys that -- young men that I think totally understand that it's a one-game-at-a-time mentality. The most improvement your team has to make is really within the first few weeks of your season, and how critically important it is to address the areas that we needed to improve upon from last Saturday.

So like when you deal with really mature, bright young guys like that, they get that. I mean, they understand that intellectually. You know, we don't have the kind -- we don't have big ego guys. So our guys are going to be really drilled and locked into what do I need to do as an individual, what do we need to do as a team to get better, because you're in a footrace to get better in the early part of the season, and I think they totally get and understand that.

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