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INDIANA UNIVERSITY FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

October 20, 2018

Tom Allen

Bloomington, Indiana

Penn State - 33, Indiana - 28

TOM ALLEN: Just a gut-wrenching loss for our team today. I thought our kids played their hearts out, played extremely hard. Proud of the effort. Just have to play better in certain situations and times, in critical moments, and really encouraged by the way our offense responded and the way we ran the football and threw the football, and just got to protect it. There was a key fumble there; losing the ball on offense and then losing the ball on special teams was a really costly mistake, and I thought special teams really hurt us today. That was to me the glaring thing that I'm very disappointed in, and not good enough. To me that's the one glaring bad spot. I thought offense and defense played well enough for us to win.

Questions?

Q. What is Michael Penix's injury and what's his status right now?
TOM ALLEN: Yeah, you know, I don't know for sure. I know he got targeted and that was called, but looks like it was a lower leg injury, which was why he was out of the game and couldn't come back. The targeting part of it did not result in any kind of hit injury, just a penalty.

We don't know yet. I asked and they said we'll know more when we do some more tests.

Q. When you went for it on 4th down down there, he looked surprised to get the snap --
TOM ALLEN: Yeah, here's the bottom line, it's real simple. We weren't supposed to snap the football, so we made a mistake. It was very clearly stated what we were supposed to do, and somebody made a mistake. That's why he was surprised that the ball was snapped, because it wasn't supposed to be. We were supposed to do that, get them to jump offsides, if they don't, then you kick a field goal. That was, you know, a mistake that we made on the field.

Q. What did you see on the two kickoff returns that really hurt you?
TOM ALLEN: Yeah, you know, well, the first one, you kick it to a guy that's got some talent, and I see -- you get leverage issues, we have nine true freshmen -- nine freshmen on our kickoff coverage unit. That's a fact. But they're good players. They're just young.

So then the second we kicked away from him, kicked to the other guy, and he was the one that hurt us worse. And so we kicked some sky kicks and then we had to hold the ball, which kind of affected -- we were supposed to squib the one he ran back as far as he did, but when he has to hold the football it's hard for the kicker to kick it with a guy holding like that according to him, and just kind of -- to me it's really, really frustrating to give up those -- to play so well on offense and defense and give up those kind of return yards. It just makes me want to puke.

But we've got to address it and evaluate it and get better. It's hard for me to say right now, I'll watch the film and get it all figured out, but that's a couple weeks in a row of not good enough coverage. If they could have kicked it out of bounds I would, but that's a penalty and gives them the ball at the 40, so not real fired up about doing that.

Q. The drive right before half, running out of time, putting Peyton back, what was the thinking there?
TOM ALLEN: Well, the rationale for putting Peyton back in there was just the fact that experience, clock management, being able to handle that situation, so just felt like it was better to put it in his hands. Michael was playing really well at the time, and so we've got two good quarterbacks and decided to play them both. I thought Michael played really well. I thought Peyton did a lot of good things, too.

But then at the end we were trying to get the ball out of bounds and then a couple guys on the sideline thought we'd call out "mayday," which was on alert, and that's kind of -- there was a little confusion on that, but there wasn't enough time to run a play after he didn't get out of bounds since we didn't have any time-outs left.

Q. The effort last week obviously wasn't what you wanted it to be, well-known, but today, a huge turnaround. You out-gained them 549 to 417.
TOM ALLEN: Well, here's the thing. I was really, really bothered by last week's performance, and I get it, and I went back and watched the film, and I wouldn't say our guys didn't play hard, okay. We did not have the energy that you have to have to play at this -- you have to play at a fevered pitch in my opinion. Where our program is right now we have to play at a fevered pitch to be able to get after an Iowa, an Ohio State, Penn State. We have to. And we played with that energy at Ohio State and we didn't have it against Iowa, and when you don't have it against a team like that, they're going to make you look bad real fast, and if we wouldn't have had it today, this team would have done the same thing to us. That's the bottom line. This team is a really good football team, and I know they're frustrated by their last couple close losses, so bottom line is that our guys responded.

I challenged them in a huge way this week, and they chose to respond, and I thought they played their hearts out. That's why there's a lot tears in that locker room because they played so hard and they did a lot of great things. But the bottom line is we didn't make enough plays to win the game, and that's why we have to go back and watch the film and learn from it. But from a perspective of heart and effort and toughness and grit and fight, I'm proud of this football team.

Q. The feel of this game, the end result, it's basically a carbon copy of so many games in previous years. How do you assess morale and keep your fingerprint on where morale goes from here?
TOM ALLEN: Yeah, I assess it in this way: Our kids are fighters, man. I looked in that locker room, in those eyes, and I had everybody's eyes on me. Just left it just now, and I promise you this team is going to keep on fighting. Yeah, they're hurting, and yeah, they want to win these close games, and we will. It's a process, and this guy right here you're looking at, okay, I believe in this football team. I believe in the way we're building it and the way we're working and the focus that we have, and I believe in these kids, and yeah, it's tough, and I hurt for them, but we're going to stay the course. We're going to keep doing the things that we're doing over and over and over and over again until we break through. It's going to happen.

Q. Can you just talk about the way McSorley played? You held him in check passing wise but he did some damage running the ball.
TOM ALLEN: I know. You know, I'll tell you what, I tried to find him afterwards. I wanted to just shake his hand and -- glad I'm not going to see him again because he's just -- he's a tough, tough kid. I mean, just competitive, gritty, man, he's just tough. He can beat you with his legs, his arm, and you know, we did some good things against him, but he's hard to keep in check. He's so good. I've got so much respect for him.

But you know, we -- I thought we did the best job against him trying to contain the pass and the run. We've always done a good job stopping the run against him the last two seasons, but I felt like we had to do some things schematically to help our perimeter route because jersey No. 1, that kid, I did find him. He's fast as the wind now, and he's a match-up problem. He's the one that took it 95 yards to the house against Ohio State in that game. So we really had to do some things against him. So that creates a lot of issues. And 24, the Sanders kid, is a really special running back, too. All those things combined with that kind of a quarterback, really proud of our kids, man, they fought hard, but just got to find a way to get more points than they do at the end.

Q. If he was as fast as the wind today, he was pretty fast, too.
TOM ALLEN: Yeah, wind was crazy.

Q. But just talk a little bit about the play at the line of scrimmage, we all know in the Big Ten, if you're going to start winning games, the games that you need to win, you've got to win the line of scrimmage. Today I thought you did. Talk about that a bit.
TOM ALLEN: You know, that's a critical piece, and we put a lot of emphasis on it, and I was disappointed in certain games this season where we haven't, but against a top-tier group, I thought our guys up front -- you always go back and look at the yards rushing and all that per carry and evaluate. They obviously put pressure on us, and they do a great job rushing the passer and all that. But I thought our kids, once again, they were challenged and they responded, and when you can run the football and contain the running as best you can on one side, especially against a team like this, they're so hard to stop because of the style that they use and the way that quarterback creates so many issues, but you know, the offensive line I thought played well, especially running the football, and Stevie Scott continues to -- I just thought he just ran with a different sense of urgency. He's still young. He's still figuring it all out. But I knew how we practiced this week and how pregame was going, I knew our kids were going to play hard. I could tell. Really proud of him and how hard he ran.

We've just got to -- some things just don't change. You go back, you evaluate, and you stay the course, and you keep doing the little things right over and over again. It takes tremendous mental toughness to do that because it's easy to get discouraged, but this team will not get discouraged because they believe in what we're doing, and I can see it in their eye, and we're going to get back in here early in the morning after we evaluate everything tonight and get ready to take on the Minnesota Golden Gophers up in Minneapolis.

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