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STANFORD UNIVERSITY FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCENovember 30, 2019David ShawStanford, California Notre Dame - 45, Stanford - 24 DAVID SHAW: I had a great moment with our seniors down there. It's hard to come up with the words for what these guys have done for this program, coming in young, learning what to do, following some really good leadership. A lot of guys earned the playing time, some guys early, some guys later. But then coming through this year and just the record, as I told them, the record goes next to my name, that's fine, the record goes next to my name and I can take it, whatever it is. And I know how to lead this football team. But the fact that we kept fighting wasn't about me. It was about the guys that we have in our locker room. Casey Toohill, Cameron Scarlett, a guy like Ryan Beecher, who is a non-scholarship, earns a scholarship after beating cancer. The inspiration in that locker room from those older guys, I couldn't come up with words. And it's incumbent upon our young guys where today is not about next year. That starts tomorrow. But the love and appreciation I have for these fourth- and fifth-year seniors that have battled through so much and have had so much success and to fight through a year like this, never taking their foot off the gas pedal, I commend them. They're Stanford men and they represented this university to a level that I don't think you can top. And I know they will do that as they leave Stanford University. As for the game, as I said, we had opportunities, much like the balance of the season. If we don't take advantage of opportunities that becomes hard to beat really good football teams. And that's what happened today, multiple times. We had them pinned down, we played great defense, in big, in long spurts. And then a couple of big plays shift the balance. But that's a really football team and they made the plays at the end of the game, second half, that we didn't make. Questions. Q. You mentioned that sequence from the punt block through the 40-yard pass where they took their first lead. Especially against a good team like that, how hard is it to respond to a sequence of events like that? DAVID SHAW: Well, it's difficult to respond, but our guys did. They came back, they fought. But you got to be, you got to be exactly where you're supposed to be at all times against a team like this. Once again, came out, had the lead, they made a couple plays to come back and then you got to respond and come back and not just hold them off, but make some more plays. And the muffed punt, once again, was difficult as we're trying to get some, get our feet in the ground and go back forward again, get a chance to get in positive field position, get back in there and make it more of a tight game. We had a couple more guys get injured today. And I commend our guys, once again, guy gets hurt, we throw another guy out there and he just goes out there and plays. That's happened all year and it happened again today. And guys don't bat an eyelash. They just run back out there. But, yeah, those game-changing plays in the second half, I think we responded with resolve, but we didn't respond with making more plays on our side. Q. It seemed like you guys had some really good stuff going on offense up until the punt block and then things got a little difficult after that. What stood out to you about your side of things, and then maybe what Notre Dame did to make it tough for you from that point on? DAVID SHAW: Well they didn't stray away from what they were doing and we didn't stray away from what we were doing. It became an execution game. We had a couple of opportunities and I'll just say it, we had a lot of conversations with the officials. There was some pass interference calls. There was some non-calls, there was a lot of contact out there on both sides. But those plays have a chance to change games. And we had some one-on-one opportunities and trying to get -- and the crew did a great job of communicating what they saw. But those were those opportunities that if we can get some separation and make some of those plays, the game changes. Q. You guys haven't used injuries as an excuse this year, but when you try to evaluate a season where you've had such a rash of injuries, how difficult is it to look at what happened this year when you're dealing with all that? DAVID SHAW: That's a great question. Evaluating, I mean, I would be shocked if we didn't have three first-team freshmen All-Americans. What our punter did this year as a true freshman is unbelievable. What Kyu Kelly did this entire year as a true freshman is unbelievable. What Walter Rouse did, starting game 2 at USC and playing the entire season at left tackle. And I want to say maybe gave up two sacks on the year. It's unreal. So on that side, there's some things that were just outstanding. On the other side, which once again, I'm responsible for the wins and losses, there are things that, regardless of injury, we had a chance to win more games. And that's what I have to go back and look at. Regardless of who is on the field, we had those opportunities to win games. It's about five games this year that they came back in the second half that if we make a couple of plays the scores are different. So once again, that's what we'll do in the off-season, myself and the coordinators in particular. Q. The play before the blocked punt, Davis Mills with the scramble, very close on the spot, was there any consideration or how much consideration was given towards maybe having the officials take a second look at that spot? DAVID SHAW: I was in communication with the official on the sidelines and they're in communication from the box. And when they say that it's confirmed, then taking a -- basically, taking a timeout to look at it is a waste of a timeout. Now, if they hadn't said it was confirmed, then, yes, then I say I would have challenged it. But they're looking at it up there, we saw it on the booth. It was close. It was really close. Looked like his head was over the line, but I couldn't see where the ball was. So counting on our guys upstairs and they couldn't really tell. They knew it was close. But once, standing next to the official, once he says, Coach, it's confirmed, then I'm not going to waste the timeout. Q. Can you take us through the thought process of the last play of the first half where you punted instead of maybe taking a shot towards the end zone? DAVID SHAW: Yeah. The average time for a play is six seconds. I believe there was seven seconds on the clock. What I was not going to do is take a, is take a shot and then have one second left on the clock and let them take a shot if we don't get it. So that's where that was. There were plays that we have that we're supposed to try to take more than that, but those also count on taking a lot of time at the line of scrimmage or trying to take more time with the ball in the quarterback's hands. So that's why we didn't take a shot there. If there were less time, we would have. Q. I know as a competitor, obviously, the post-season is what you want, but I'm just curious with the state of this team and what it's been through, how helpful is it to get to the off-season now as opposed to four weeks, five weeks, a month from now? DAVID SHAW: Yeah. It's never preferable. We will utilize this time very well. We have, essentially after this game, about 30 guys that will be rehabbing. About 20-plus of them are post-surgery rehabs. So that's a good time for those guys. But once again, with so many young guys playing, we have a lot of guys that don't need post-season surgery but need to take about three weeks off, because what's missing when you play a lot of freshmen, I don't know how many freshmen we played. You guys probably know better than me. It was probably, of our entire class, about three quarters of them played, if not more than three quarters. Probably 80 percent of them played in games. Half of them played a lot in games. These guys are playing without an entire off-season. So as you look out there and you got a true freshmen going against a guy who is a junior, that guy has two more full off-seasons of lifting and running than our freshmen that come in in June and have about a month and a half to get ready for college football. So that process for those guys, we'll start in the winter, but a lot of those guys have been holding up, thankfully, but they need about three weeks to get their bodies back so that we can actually attack winter quarter and really get back in conditioning. So as coaches, it's more time than we wanted, but it gives a lot of time to do a lot of scheme evaluations. This team is going to change a little bit as we go from this year to next year with the guys that are leaving and the guys that are coming back. And as coaches, we have to prepare for that. There's things that we know that we want to do, things that we have to see. We got a handful of guys that have some really tough decisions to make. And over the next couple weeks I'm going to help guide those guys and see what's best for them. And then we'll know probably in about a month or so who is coming back and who is not and we can really start to draft our plan for 2020. Q. The camera a couple times during the game cut to K.J. who was still dialed into the game even though he wasn't playing. How much do you feel for his senior season? I know it didn't go the way he wanted to in coming back. DAVID SHAW: Yeah, K.J. and I had a conversation yesterday, and I just told him that I love him. And this entire year, I've just, I felt for him. The aspirations that he had, difficult when you can't attain those. Didn't even have an opportunity to go after those. He's one of those guys that he had a tough decision to make. We'll see how it goes over the next couple weeks. But one thing about K.J., you never question his heart. You saw him. He's over there talking to guys, he's seeing the protections, he's seeing the coverage changes, he's going to talk to Davis. I can't say enough about the involvement of our guys that were injured but were able to stay around. And it's really easy to lose focus and get and drift off. I think it happens across the country and it's really hard to get those guys back in because they're competitors and they're not having a chance to compete. But I commend these guys, both for staying involved, staying connected to their teammates, and at the same time, really putting a lot of work in to try to get healthy, to stay in shape. And K.J. was hoping for a bowl game and just trying to hopefully get a chance to go back in and play because at the end of the day he just wants to play football. So I felt for him, but I commend him and his family on how he's handled this very, very difficult situation. Q. When you're up 17-7, what had your defense been doing right to contain Ian Book and Notre Dame? DAVID SHAW: Well, two big things. It's not a secret. Number one, don't let him out. Keep him in the pocket. Now he can still hurt you from the pocket. He's got a quick release, he's got great feet, and he's got a strong arm. But he hurts you more outside the pocket. And we were able to keep him in the pocket and we got guys in his face, we pushed him in the pocket a couple times, we got him on the ground. But those times where he can get outside the pocket and buy time, if he can sit back there and float, then those guys have a chance to get back behind our mid-level coverage guys. And outside of the outside play, which is a great play by them, two of those big plays were over the middle and both of them were him having an extra two seconds. You give a guy like that an extra two seconds and it's hard to be successful. So first quarter and a half, I thought we did a great job up front. You saw Jovan Swann getting after it, playing really well. I thought we were really good on the edges. And as the game progressed, we let him out of the box a couple times and he'll hurt you. Q. Two straight weeks at the end where the opposing players and fans have celebrated on your field. Is that something you hope the underclassmen sort of use as fuel and motivation in the off-season or kind of what do you take from that for that, for the underclassmen? DAVID SHAW: Yeah, I don't worry about that. Yeah, I mean to the victors go the spoils. I plan on celebrating at a lot of other people's fields next year. Thank you. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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