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NAVY FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCEOctober 27, 2018Ken NiumataloloSan Diego, California Navy - 22, Notre Dame - 44 THE MODERATOR: We'll start with an opening statement from coach. KEN NIUMATALOLO: Hats off to Notre Dame. Really good football team. You can see why they're ranked where they're at. Proud of our kids. I thought our kids continued to battle. Resilient, tough kids. Proud of that. But you just got to tip your hat to Notre Dame. Really good football team. THE MODERATOR: Questions for the coach or the players. Q. You had a great start, got a fumble on the first play from scrimmage. You feel like not being able to capitalize there, it would have set a good tone? KEN NIUMATALOLO: Yeah, we needed to do something. We couldn't. A lot of it had to do with them. They're a good team. Q. Coach, you see Notre Dame every year, but now the attention that they have on them, the spotlight being in the top four in a College Football Playoff era, does this group, do they seem different, unique, special? KEN NIUMATALOLO: Yeah, they do. I mean, I played them many times. There's a great sense of focus on their team. They're really good in a lot of different places. Just offensively obviously really good. I thought they shut us down offensively in the first half. Sound on special teams. But they're ranked No. 3 for a reason. Just a really solid, focused group. Like I said, we played them before, played Coach Kelly's team before. This is one of his better teams. Q. What adjustments did you make in the second half? KEN NIUMATALOLO: Yeah, we just tried to do some stuff with the safeties, playing zero coverage, playing pretty aggressive. We just tried to do some stuff to slow them down a little bit. Q. After you scored a couple touchdowns in the second half, you showed signs of life, but weren't able to stop them. KEN NIUMATALOLO: Yeah, we played tough defense in the first half. If we could have got something going offensively, it could have helped out. Then we got something going offensively, we had a hard time slowing them down. It's kind of been us this whole year. We have to do a better job of playing complementary football in all three phases. Again, a lot of it had to do with them. That's a really good football team. Q. Players, what do you take from this game? UNIDENTIFIED PLAYER: I think I speak for all of us. We battled all the way till the end. Obviously there's some things we got to clear up offensively and defensively. But this is no different than any other week. We have to go back to work next week. Q. Any thoughts on the offense, what happened in the first half? UNIDENTIFIED PLAYER: We made some mistakes ourselves. But also at the end of the day they're a really good football team. We knew we had to play very well to move the ball and score touchdowns on them. We just didn't do that in the first half. Q. Coach, they made a change at left guard. Looked like they tried to run left a good bit early. How tough does that make it for you? You called Ian Book elite earlier in the week. What did you make of his performance? KEN NIUMATALOLO: He can run. He's got a really good arm. Obviously he can throw the football. But he's tough. If people are covered, he extends the play with his legs. That last third down, had a long time back there, stayed alive, stayed alive. That was a back breaker. We feel like we're two scores at that point. If we could have got a stop there, that would have been huge. He made that play. The change at left guard was tough, but there were a lot of other things they had going on, too. They're a good team. I mean, we knew that coming in. We knew we had to play perfect, have some help from them. We didn't. Our kids battled till the end. Q. Defensively your inability to get some stops? Talk about what happened. UNIDENTIFIED PLAYER: Like we all said, they're a pretty good football team. We were just trying to work within our cause, do what we could do as far as getting the ball back, getting our offense on the field. Of course, there are a lot of plays every game you want to have back. We're looking to work on that, get in the film room, making sure we get these teams off the field so we give our offense the ball. THE MODERATOR: Thanks. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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