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ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCESeptember 19, 2018Pat NarduzziGreensboro, North Carolina PAT NARDUZZI: Obviously we take on North Carolina down in Chapel Hill, a team that is going through a lot of adversity down there with the hurricane this week. I'm sure a lot of the families were uprooted, so our prayers are with the Carolina families and coaching staff and everything that's going on down there. We also have a football game to play this Saturday. I know we'll be locked in. I'm sure Coach Fedora will have those guys locked in down there to the football game, which is probably the second most important thing going on in their lives right now. But we're looking forward to heading down. I think they've got a great football team on both sides of the ball. Their specialists are special, and it's going to be a great challenge as it's been every year we've played North Carolina. Q. Tell me a little bit about Parker Braun, No. 75, and just your impressions of him from the last couple weeks. PAT NARDUZZI: Yeah, Georgia Tech's game last week, first of all, it's a tough team. They're a really good football team that's going to win a lot of football games. They've got to keep their heads up and play. But that left guard, Parker, you're talking about, it's funny you ask that question because after a game you shake the coach's hand, you try to grab some players and pat them on the head and encourage them and say keep your heads up and all those things. But one of the guys I happened to bump into after the game -- usually you get seven to ten guys -- I was fortunate to bump into him and really grabbed him and talked to him for a few seconds. Great question. I grabbed him and said, hey, you're a heck of a football player. That guy is special. If any line in the country had five of those guys, they would win a ton of football games. He's got a high motor. He understands the game of football. He understands leverage. He's nasty. He's just a nasty football player. He plays through the whistle every down. He's a guy that as a football coach -- you know, when we get to vote for All-Conference guys, that's the guy I'm voting for because I love the way he plays the game. He plays it the right way, and that's a guy we talked to our kids going into the game, you'd better watch out for that guy because he will block you every down. He ain't going to take a play off. Q. (Indiscernible). PAT NARDUZZI: No, not necessarily in that game, but just through the years watching all the tape, he's just a football player. He's one of the best linemen in the ACC, period. He blocks the heck out of you and he's tough and he's physical and he's nasty. That's what you want in an offensive lineman, period. He's athletic. Q. This week the ACC and the CFP are celebrating Extra Yard For Teachers. I was wondering if you could tell us what role teachers played in your life and how they impacted your life. PAT NARDUZZI: Teachers, you know, obviously all coaches are teachers, but I grew up in a family of teachers. My dad was a teacher, education-type guy, taught in high school. So I grew up with an educator in the house, an English teacher. When you look at just my family, we've got four children, and teachers are so important in everyone's lives, period. That's how we grow up, with teachers. In my opinion, you have good teachers and some bad teachers out there, just like in every profession. And teachers are so important how they impact students every day as far as -- not necessarily even the teaching that may be going on in the classroom, but just how they impact kids every day with the personal things going on in their lives. But my wife is an education major and teacher, and she's got a master's in education, I've got a master's -- an education major, as well. I'm a teacher. And throughout my years, I remember the great teachers that I had through the years, and there's been a bunch of them that impacted my life. So I know how impactful they are in everybody's lives in a positive way, sometimes it can be in a negative way. As we talk teachers here, I've got a daughter that just graduated with a degree in education and wants to be a teacher, and just kind of seeing what's going on in the world of teachers and all the stuff that's going on in life -- since there's no other North Carolina questions going on today -- teachers don't make enough money for what they do for kids, and I think that's something that needs to be corrected in this country. They work their tails off, and if we want to have good teachers and want these kids to be impacted, teachers across the country have to make more money. Q. I wanted to know, the early part of the season, and I've heard you guys talk before about the fact that college football doesn't get preseason or exhibition games; what have you seen from that early portion, and do you set benchmarks of, okay, I want to see us be able to do this or we're not going to do it this year? How do you look at the early part of the season? PAT NARDUZZI: When you say do this or do what, what exactly are you talking about? Scheduling or... Q. In other words, are you good at something or are you not good enough to include it this year? PAT NARDUZZI: Include what? I'm sorry. Q. In other words, trusting corners to play more man-to-man or the way you -- PAT NARDUZZI: Fundamentally, what are you good at? Okay. I think I've got you. Again, just talking the no preseason, what are you getting out of -- we've got to play whatever we need to play. You kind of go into the summer, you go into the spring after the season is over and recruiting is over saying, okay, who do we have to defend this year defensively, who do we have to execute against offensively? And you put in what you need, maybe coverage beaters on offense to throw the ball, runs that you like versus various fronts you're going to get, and you need to get reps out of them. And, again, the only real live reps is in a real live game because it's hard to get that many physical reps against each other in practice, and everybody needs to see a little bit different. Defensively, we need to defend something and they need to execute on something. You truly never get what you really need to. So it takes time. If you're playing a lighter opponent in week 1, it helps you a little bit just to figure out what you need. But the only way you learn in this football game is through experience, okay? We're going to learn something -- game 8 unfortunately, we're going to learn something. From our development and from our habits that we've built in practice, we're going to learn something like, wow, we should have covered that a long time ago, huh? Something appears, just like in the second game that we had this year, we just didn't practice enough against -- in wet balls, and you think you did, but it's never enough. It's like maybe we should have had more. We should have had mud on the balls with the water. It could always be more. Some of the new drills you want to do, you just kind of go -- you take things for granted sometimes as coaches and thinking they know that, but the only time you really know they know it is if they're forced into that situation where they've got to execute at a fast rate, time, and they've got to think fast and make quick decisions. Q. Other than wet, muddy footballs, have there been any big surprises about what this team can and can't do for you? PAT NARDUZZI: You know, not really. Again, like I said, it's just the details of everything we do, period. Whether it's fair catching a kickoff, you think it's a simple thing, you think it's easy, but there's a lot more that goes to it. People think the game of football is simple. There's so many different things that happen during a game, and sometimes you're not going to find it until you get to that game unfortunately. And you can work different situations, whether it's two-minute, four-minute, coming out. I mean, you can work your different special teams. Sometimes those situations pop up and you're not prepared for them. Q. We often hear from coaches that one of the most revealing moments for any team is how it copes with adversity. How would you assess, especially defensively, how you guys bounced back from the adversity of Penn State to then turning around and playing well this past Saturday against Tech? PAT NARDUZZI: You know what, I think we played well as a team. And you talk especially defensively, man, it's -- especially offensively, it's especially special teams. Our special teams the week before were just probably -- something probably in terms of atrocious. I can say that afterwards because we were anything but that last Saturday. So sometimes you learn from your mistakes. But you know, it's tough. I mean, it's a tough week after a tough loss. It's a tough week in the office for coaches. It's a tough week for our wives and kids because they're never -- they're always looking at you sideways like, what's wrong with you? It's like, we didn't have fun this week. It's a tough week for our kids. It's tough when they've got to walk on campus and people look at them funnier than maybe they looked at them before, like what's wrong with you? What did you do this weekend? But our kids work their tails off, and you love their effort. We're never going to be 100 percent perfect. We're never going to be undefeated every day in our lives. We talk about adversity all the time. That's something we've talked about all week about how are we going to deal with it, are we going to fold or step up. Defensively, holding them to 19 points, and shoot, only Georgia and Clemson have done that the last 39 opportunities out there. Holding them to a shutout in the first half is almost unheard of against that option. But it's incredible how we came back from it. It just teaches you how whatever happened last week doesn't matter, it's move on to the next, and that's what our kids did, and I'm proud of them for that. Q. Did you have anybody on your roster affected by this hurricane in North Carolina? Do you have any players from the area that were worried about their families? PAT NARDUZZI: Yeah, we don't have any kids from North Carolina on our roster right now, so really didn't have anybody affected. I'll tell you, Kevin Sherman, our wide receiver coach's family was affected. I just kind of found out from my wife. I'm in here trying to find out if we can get a sack on 3rd down or maybe get a 1st down on 3rd down, and you go, okay, none of our kids are really affected. And when I say that, nobody that has come to me. Maybe they've got an aunt down there, but there's not a mom or dad, grandma or grandpa that I know of that -- that has come up to me that's got a problem that hey, I need to go home and so. But I know Kevin Sherman's wife, Jennifer, is headed down there yesterday, I believe to take care of them. They lost a couple houses down there, so a rough, rough time for Kevin Sherman and his wife and his family. Q. Talk about North Carolina; what do you see on their offense? I know they were kind of struggling a little bit before the hurricane. What do you see with their film and all that stuff? PAT NARDUZZI: You know, I see an explosive football team that's scary. I really do. Nathan Elliott has got -- Nathan Elliott played his tail off last year against us. We didn't know much about what was going to happen, coach's kid, but he came down and played his tail off in Pittsburgh last year. Great football player. He's a physical runner. He didn't play the second half. That hurt them obviously with that targeting. And I'm still not sure how that young man at East Carolina is because you never hear for some reason after something like that happens. But Antonio is a physical dude with the ball in his hands and without the ball in his hands, and obviously Anthony Ratliff Williams is a guy that they want to get the ball up to. They're a good football team. What I noticed offensively out of them is they're scary because you might not see it on the scoreboard, but it's going to come, and you hope it doesn't come until a couple weeks down the road, at least not this week. They're getting down in the red zone and they're ending up kicking field goals. The other team is scoring touchdowns and you're kicking field goals you're not going to have success. It's a matter of a game of inches. An inch for them or an inch for an opponent, whatever it may be, you've got to make plays down in the red zone. And, really, that's what they've lacked, but I'm sure they're game-planning, trying to correct those things and get the ball in the playmakers' hands. I see a team that's moving the ball and stalling out in the red zone, but that's just a matter of time, or sometimes it's just bad luck. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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