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ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE MEDIA CONFERENCE

September 1, 2010

Jim Grobe

THE MODERATOR: Thank you and welcome to today's ACC football teleconference, the first of the 2010 football season.
The first ACC football players of the week will be announced Tuesday after the Labor Day Monday games which feature Maryland and Virginia Tech. Thereafter, ACC players of the week will be announced each Monday, usually by 12 noon on those days.
With that, we welcome Jim Grobe, head coach at Wake Forest. Just a brief opening statement and then we'll go to questions.
COACH GROBE: Thank you, Mike.
We're excited to get started. We've had a good week of practice I think getting ready for Presbyterian. I think we've had a good month really of work here in August. I think our kids are excited to get out and play.
We've remained fairly healthy and hopefully can do that through the season. But I think right now it's time to go play somebody.
THE MODERATOR: Questions for Coach Grobe.

Q. Jim, your new starting quarterback, what about the guy did you see in the fall camp that made you think this is the guy to do it?
COACH GROBE: What we've done, we were concerned when we started camp because we really had four guys competing for the job. So rather than count on one really good practice or one really good scrimmage that would get us excited, we just decided to start tracking everything these guys have done, every practice, every throw, every decision, good or bad. We just tried to know everything about each kid that we possibly could.
And throughout camp, Ted has been at the top of the list. He's done the best job mentally, the best job throwing the football, those type things. So he deserves to be the guy.
We have some kids that have done some good things during camp but not as consistently as Ted. I think consistency is the main thing we're looking at, giving him the first shot as being the guy.

Q. What are his strong suits as a quarterback?
COACH GROBE: I think he throws the ball okay. He's had two shoulder surgeries, so he's had to overcome those. He seems to be fully recovered. He's not got a strong arm as Riley Skinner. He's got some of the touch that Riley has. Throws a nice, catchable ball. But he's got really good foot speed. He can really run. I think he gives us a little bit different dimension in our offense.
Of all of our quarterbacks, he's probably the most balanced with the ability to throw and run the football.

Q. I wanted to ask you about your defensive line. I saw you have two redshirt freshmen starting. Can you tell me a little bit about those guys, how much of a concern that is to you up front.
COACH GROBE: Well, we've really got four or five kids that we want to play. I'm basically talking about defensive tackle. We feel like our defensive ends are older guys that can really play. But we've got four or five guys that we'll try to go with tomorrow night.
I think Ramon Booi and Frank Souza are two defensive tackles that are going to probably play about an equal number of snaps. I think both of those kids, you know, can play over the guards. They're big, physical kids. They're both 300-pound kids.
The guy that is really, really interesting right now is Nikita Whitlock. He's a kid that when we recruited him out of high school, he was a nose guard. He was the State Player of the Year in Texas. We tried to move him to linebacker this past spring. We moved him back to nose guard. He's just done a really, really good job for us. He's an undersized guy. He's about 5'10", 245 pounds, but a really strong kid.
We moved him down really just kind of for fun. We knew what a great nose guard he was in high school. We moved him down just kind of to see what would happen because we felt like we had a lot of linebackers. He had a great spring.
Then the other kid that's competing with him for reps is Kris Redding, defensive lineman, who we really like. Feel like both those kids will get a lot of snaps tomorrow night.
Our key is trying to keep these guys fresh, rolling them in and out of the game so at some point. We're undersized but I think if we can stay fresh these guys can be physical enough to play in there.

Q. What are the biggest concerns about a rookie quarterback, especially going into this first game?
COACH GROBE: You know, we feel a little bit better about Ted just 'cause he's older. I think the one we'd have a little bit more concern maybe would be Tanner Price, being a true freshman. I think with Ted, our biggest concern with Ted is keeping him healthy. He's been banged up since he's been here. This is probably the longest stretch, this past month, that he's been healthy, been able to go to practice. We had a lot of lingering issues with his shoulder. He hurt it in the state championship game his senior year in high school, had a surgery, then got to us and had to have another surgery.
I think with Ted, I think he'll do the good things. He's a pretty settled guy, doesn't get rattled too easily. I think anytime you have an inexperienced quarterback, your first concern is decision making, want to make sure you're not turning the football over, making silly throws, not doing a good job carrying the football.
I think with Ted, he knows he's got to take care of the football. He's mature enough to stay calm out there. I think he'll make some good decisions. For us, our concern with him is to get him going and find out how durable he is, can he go out and play four quarters and play healthy.

Q. Do you anticipate Tanner Price playing? If so, what do you like about the way he's come on?
COACH GROBE: We're really kind of wait and see, to be honest. I think there's a lot of different scenarios that could play out tomorrow night.
My best-case scenario would be if Ted plays really well, we don't have to use Tanner. But Tanner has earned the opportunity to play. We'd rather have one quarterback playing for us. If we could keep Tanner on the shelf, we'd like to do that. That will basically be up to Ted. If Ted goes out and plays really, really well, we can be patient with Tanner, kind of have a wait-and-see approach. If Ted were to get banged up or not play very well, I think Tanner is the next guy up, and he's earned that opportunity.
Once we put a freshman out there, throughout the season he's going to get a lot of repetitions. I would not be surprised tomorrow night if we saw Sky Jones a little bit, Brendan Cross a little bit. But I think with Tanner, we want to make sure when we pull the trigger and put him out there that he gets a lot of work.
He's got better arm strength than Riley Skinner. Probably doesn't have the touch that Riley had yet. He's got a ton of ability, runs fairly well. I think he can run some of the stuff in our offense and the running game that we're asking the kids to do.
Tanner's main strength is he's got a really strong arm and really throws the ball well.

Q. Can you talk a little bit about Matt Woodlief, where he's sitting in with the linebackers, what kind of pre-season he's had, what he means to you all in terms of a leadership guy.
COACH GROBE: Well, he's an emotional leader for us. He's a tough guy. I think probably is friends with everybody on our football team. Everybody loves the guy. He's a really hard working. He's always upbeat, in a good mood. The guys love him.
I worried about Matt because last season and into spring, he got so big, he lost some foot speed, wasn't making enough plays. He got bumped out of a starting position. He's still behind Hunter Haynes, but will play a lot of football tomorrow night. He's gotten his weight down. He's moving a lot better. His foot speed has improved tremendously with his weight down and he's starting to get in on a lot of plays again like he was when he was a younger player for us.
Matt is really important to us. I think he's certainly one of our team leaders. I think he's worked his way into lots of playing time.

Q. He said when he was a freshman and sophomore, guys like Aaron Curry and Jon Abatte shared stuff with him and other players. That kind of attitude from older players carried over. That has to be good for your team.
COACH GROBE: It's really, really good. Matt, he's one of those guys that has an off-the-chart work ethic. He loves the weight room. He loves practice. The nice thing about Matt Woodlief is when you pick out guys like Jon Abatte and Aaron Curry to watch and emulate, you've picked the right guys. I think he was smart enough to figure out he's going to watch the best linebackers on the team and figure out what they do. Basically what he figured out, they have great work ethics, they love playing the game.
He brings that same kind of energy to our football team. I was worried about him last spring because he had gotten so big he couldn't run well enough to make the plays. In the off-season, he got his weight down and I think he's going to have a really good senior year.

Q. Tell me a little bit about your other Josh at runningback, Josh Harris. Seems like he had a good camp.
COACH GROBE: Yeah, he did. He's going to get some carries tomorrow night. I think we'll use three runningbacks. We hadn't gotten him as many reps early in August camp because we had Josh Adams and Brandon Pendergrass in front of him. He's gotten more carries in the past week, week and a half. He's the fastest of the three runningbacks. We feel like Josh Adams runs well, but Josh Harris is a little quicker than Josh Adams.
He's got pretty good size to him. I think he's a couple hundred pounds. He's got kind of a Chris Barclay kind of foot speed. We're excited about Josh.
I would hesitate to say too many good things about him until they get out on the field against other people. At least in practice he's been very impressive.
THE MODERATOR: Jim, thanks for being with us. We'll talk to you next week.
COACH GROBE: Thank you.

End of FastScripts

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