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ARMY FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

November 18, 2006

Bobby Ross

COACH ROSS: Okay. You all know this and I don't have to say, this Notre Dame is really a great football team, and you've got to give Charlie and their whole program a tremendous amount of credit. They are good. I mean, they are very good. You know, we are still struggling and trying to build. I wasn't displeased with some things, and I thought there were some things that we did reasonably well, or at least better.
We're really struggling there and you can tell it at the quarterback position. We're young there. We tried two or three different combinations and stayed with Pevoto in the second half. It's an awful lot to ask of a freshman to come in here and deliver and make the plays that we would have thought would he would have to have make.
We didn't do very well. We didn't protect well up front. I think that was one of our big problems in the game is we didn't protect well. We wanted to run the ball as much as we possibly could. We started off well with that, and then we started moving their line a little, did a little slanting, etc. Their quickness was a little bit too much for us to handle.
Defensively I thought we did some decent things. Our problem is we can't generate a pass rush. Pass rush, it's not there. Brady Quinn, just he had all day. I mean, he could just stand back there. There were a couple times where we forced him to scramble on a 3rd and 10 and he scrambled for 10, 12, 15 yards and that type of thing. And the coverage was decent. But our problem is pass rush and defensively, that's a big part of it, right now, at least what I saw in this football game today.
We were trying to slant, do a lot of different things pressure-wise to get something on him. And when we do that, we open up running lanes, and that's something we don't have the necessary quickness and speed to get off and handle that type of thing.
Our kicking game was good. I was pleased with that, I thought we played well, punted well I was very pleased with what our kickoff team did for the day.
That's pretty much it in nutshell. Notre Dame is better than we are. We all know that. They have a great program and in Quinn, they have a premiere football player. And the wide-outs, all three of them today, I think they had a heck of a day against us. We were trying to take a couple things away from the two big ones. When you do that, they are smart enough, they can counter that, and they did. They did a very great job with it. They are a great football program, and we wish them nothing but the best in the future. Questions?

Q. One of the things that you were able to do was prevent -- longest pass they got off was 24 yards. Can you talk about what the secondary was able to do to keep everything in front of them?
COACH ROSS: That was the plan. The plan was not to give them anything deep. Whatever we did, we were not going to give them something cheap. If they have to drive, they drove and they are capable of doing that, too.
But we did try to take that away, and if there was an element to the plan that did work, that would have been it. We are minus a very, very good safety, maybe our best defensive football player. I thought the kids stepped in there and did a pretty good job and very pleased with the way number 19 played. He's been out most of the year and he came back in the last couple of ballgames and played the way I thought he could play and I thought he was the one that had the nice interception early in the ballgame.

Q. You've coached a National Champion, the team you played today have National Championship quality?
COACH ROSS: Oh, written all over it, all over it. I don't know that there would be a weakness to their team. They have great speed, and their defense has changed a little from the beginning of the season. They got to more of a pressure package and they have the people to do that.
Their quickness was just -- they are not -- you know, they are not what you call massive in size, but they are not small, either, but they have great, great quickness and that's what was giving us such a difficult time. We were running plays that sometimes -- and when they started slanting and moving, and the pressure of course was a couple of things. We had a couple of things to try to hit them on the pressure, but just our quarterback, our youngster, he had a little trouble with it. He's young and he just wasn't ready for that type of speed. We can't simulate their speed in practice, there's no question about that.

Q. Is the reciprocation on Army's part, going over for Notre Dame's alma mater --
COACH ROSS: We have great respect for their program, I know I do, and have for many, many years. We would certainly have done that, and really would have done it with any team you feel that way about.

Q. You obviously have coached a lot of great quarterbacks in your day, can you just talk about Brady Quinn, what separates him, what makes him a little different?
COACH ROSS: I think you know with Quinn, obviously he's got a cannon of an arm. Many, many years ago when I first went into pro coaching as an assistant I saw a great arm in a guy named Burke Jones (ph). He had strength to his arm and I believe Brady Quinn's arm reminds me of that. That's the first thing that comes to focus. He can put that ball down to 35 yards on a line and that's very difficult. I mean, he's got to have a very strong arm to do that.
The other facet to it is he can run. There were times our coverage was pretty good, third down, third and 10 or 11, I think I made reference to it earlier but he scrambled and made the necessary yardage. He's certainly very, very high in my mind as far as the Heisman Trophy winner.
Thank you for your attention.

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