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NAVY MEDIA CONFERENCE

November 7, 2009

Ken Niumatalolo

COACH NIUMATALOLO: First of all, I want to say it's been a great honor for our program to come here to South Bend. The people here, Coach Weis and everybody, has been so hospitable. We came yesterday, and just the people that have been here have been phenomenal to us and our kids and our program. We thank all the people here for making this -- being nice to us, and I want to say it was a great game.
I've got to take our hats off to the kids, both teams. It was a hard-fought game. Both teams battled. Jimmy came back after it seemed like a concussion -- whatever happened to him, he continued to battle and come back.
But I want to give our kids credit for continuing to fight against a great Notre Dame team. I don't have much more to say about our kids. I'm speechless with our kids.
It's a great honor for me to be a coach at the Naval Academy because these young men, this is it for them. So this is a great honor for me to come here and help these young men to progress as leaders and to come in a great, historic place like Notre Dame because next year they'll be serving our country. But phenomenal, phenomenal young men to coach.

Q. Notre Dame's offensive series when you got the safety on them, you had the two sacks. What did you do in terms of your rush differently that you hadn't really done much in the other game?
COACH NIUMATALOLO: I don't think it was anything different. We were doing the same things. I think our kids just dug deep. Jimmy wasn't moving as well as he was early on. I think he's obviously backed up and looking to make a play to throw the football and held on to it a little bit too long, but he had been making plays holding onto it.
Our kids just battled. We had a hard time getting to him. They do a great job protecting the quarterback, and our kids just battled there at the last two plays.

Q. Ram may have big plays every week, but it seems like here in the stadium he's had very memorable plays. Can you just talk about him?
COACH NIUMATALOLO: Well, I thought our defense did a great job in the red zone. They moved the ball down the field, and our kids buckled down once we got down there. I'm sure they'll look that they had some missed opportunities in the red zone, and obviously that was a big turnover that changed the whole momentum of the game.
But I think that happened a lot, it wasn't just that one series, but there were some drives, it seemed like from 20 they kind of moved the ball pretty easily, and then we got down there down into the red zone, and I thought our kids battled and made plays there in the red zone.

Q. It seemed like it was kind of a reverse of last year's game; they did a pretty good job against the option defensive, and this year you really got up on them. What do you think the key there to getting that hot offensive start?
COACH NIUMATALOLO: I think the one thing that helped us, and I really hope this doesn't come across wrong, but I think the thing that helped us this year was last year because we knew that they'd line up the same way. We didn't execute very well last year, and coming into this year they did a great job against us last year defensively, so we had a pretty good clue that they were going to come back and do the same things as they did last year, and we had a few things. We were expecting that same defense that we saw last year.
But it was still a grind. I mean, they're still a great defense, and we thought we had some alignments in some of our formations. But it was a grind to get yardage against them even though we thought we had some numbers advantages in certain formations.

Q. Can you just talk about the emotion of this victory as compared to last time? I mean, you guys were a little more subdued. Is it because you had done it before and it wasn't as historic?
COACH NIUMATALOLO: We talked all week, we felt like we had them in a perfect situation, similar to Ohio State. There was a lot of talk this week on BCS Bowl games, not from their team, but media thinking about what BCS Bowl game was coming up. I know Pitt is coming next week, and they're a phenomenal team, so we kind of felt like we had them in a perfect storm. Just looking to the postseason, very, very good Pitt team coming next week, and it's us coming.
So we kind of felt like, hey, if we come out and execute, we'd have a chance to compete. We feel like we're a pretty good team, too. We've had some tough losses, but we feel like every ballgame we've been in we've had a chance to win.

Q. Sort of in that same vein, so many of your defensive guys who made big plays today had big plays in the last win here. How did that sort of experience just sort of carry over today?
COACH NIUMATALOLO: It was still tough. Our guys, we had a ton of guys that played but every time we saw that ball in the air going on the fade on the sideline, I held my breath. They're so good at the deep ball, so good at completing it, and they came millimeters away from catching some other ones.
Our kids just battled. I don't know what to say. Normally they've been making those catches, and our kids made a nice job of making some plays and breaking on the ball. But like I said, every time the ball was in the air, all of us on our side held our breath.

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