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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN MEDIA CONFERENCE

September 13, 2008

Rich Rodriguez

COACH RODRIGUEZ: The turnovers, are you kidin' me? Sorry I made y'all wait. I wanted to hurry up, take a shower, get out of here as quick as we can. Obviously disappointed in our execution, certainly didn't help ourselves early, put ourselves in a tremendous hole with some turnovers, and turnovers will hurt you anytime but the once that are really discouraging are the unforced errors.
I mean, wasn't anybody knocking the ball out or stripping the ball out, it's just dropin' the ball.
The guys are trying hard, and they don't mean to do it, so it's nothing -- other than just telling them to relax and take care of the ball. We had Steve Threet out there competing, and I thought we had a potential touchdown, and instead of 7 for us it's 7 for them.
So it was a nightmare, but as I told the team, we've got too many things going for us that maybe the outside public doesn't see, the work ethic and the commitment. We have tremendous support from the school, our fans, I have a great staff and our players are really trying. We've got to execute better and not make mistakes that cost us in a game.

Q. Rich, do you feel at this point you gotta protect them a little, buck 'em up or ride 'em harder? What's your approach?
COACH RODRIGUEZ: Do what we've been doing. Everybody outside -- you know, I'm not going to have outside influences affecting the way we're running our program. We're going to keep doin' what we're doin' and we're going to watch the tape and see where the mistakes are at.
I can tell you a lot of 'em are unforced errors. Maybe it's inexperience, I don't know. I don't think we're of that off. We're not good enough to play poorly and win; we're not. Maybe in the future we will be. Like I said, there is a lot of positive things going on. The guys are working extremely hard. Michigan football will be back, you know, all the naysayers out there, whatever, I'm not -- I'm disappointed but I'm not discouraged. Michigan football will be back, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Q. Rich, Greg Mathews, was he injured?
COACH RODRIGUEZ: I think he was crampin' up; I think it was a matter of cramps. I haven't talked to the trainer yet, Steve Threet was cramping up at the end. I don't know if -- Greg grabbed his stomach a little bit. I don't know if it was a stomach virus or something else.

Q. Coach, talk a little bit about what you were able to do against Notre Dame's pressure. How were you able to neutralize that?
COACH RODRIGUEZ: Coaches had a pretty good plan, and I don't know what we ran for, but we were running the football, had some good drives goin' and then we would have a turnover or a mistake here and there that stopped that.
I felt we were making steps -- again, I have to watch the film and see if we blocked every play the way we were supposed to, but I thought our -- I thought we had a good plan coming in, we just didn't -- and we got behind early and stuck with it, which I thought was important. We were creepin' our way back up there, and then we had the one turnover late in the second half that could have pulled us within one score, and that was a tough one.

Q. What's your impression of this Notre Dame team?
COACH RODRIGUEZ: I thought they played pretty hard. They made a few big plays; they made a few more plays than we did.

Q. (No microphone.)
COACH RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, they did a nice job blocking. I don't know what they ran for, but the defense was putin' us in tough spots, and they did a lot of quick game stuff, which it's hard to get to your quarterback when you're catching and throwing and doing some quick game. We didn't bat any balls down, but they did a nice job of protecting on the quick game, and they hit a few plays.

Q. Can you comment on the effort out of McGuffie today?
COACH RODRIGUEZ: Sam runs hard. He continues to get better. I thought he saw some things a bit better today, and he'll keep getting better. We have a good crew of running backs. I would like to have been able to get Mike Shaw a few more reps today but he missed most of the week of practice, so he's better, but I don't think he's 100%. We'll get him cranked up hopefully in time for the next one.

Q. Rich, you had some guys in the secondary today who had some touch moments. Any idea what happened?
COACH RODRIGUEZ: They made a few plays, and you know, but they also bounced back a little bit, too. We had a couple of really close penalties on there, and I have to watch the film to see what those were, but he was pretty accurate with deep balls, and they got some pretty good wide-outs, but I'll have to see the film to see if it's a technique issue or what happened, but that's going to happen on occasion.

Q. Was that fake punt by design?
COACH RODRIGUEZ: That's a read play; it's part of our base punt. We have it built in there. Zoltan did a nice job, and we needed time to get some momentum, but like I say, the guys' effort has been good. I don't see guys that are dogging it, and they're going to continue to work, and that will always be continuous. They will continue to work hard, and as I told the team we'll keep pressin' on and pressin' on, and we'll get it right.

Q. Did you see what happened with Butler at the end?
COACH RODRIGUEZ: I didn't see it.

Q. Coach, Threet played the majority of the game. Was that by design or --
COACH RODRIGUEZ: He's been playing better. I thought he played well at times. He missed a few things, but he competed pretty well and made some passes, and fortunately we had one or two out there maybe we didn't get, but I thought he did okay. Thank you.

End of FastScripts

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