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ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE MEDIA CONFERENCE

November 3, 2010

Randy Shannon

COACH SHANNON: This week we've got Maryland coming to town, Coach Friedgen and his Terrapins coming to town. Watching the game of some tape against Maryland, this last past couple of days has been very interesting watching a team that's transformed from 2 and 10 last year to playing 6 and 2 ball right now and doing a very good job.
Defensively it's going to be one of those games where they bring a lot of different blitzes for us, and with us having a young quarterback in the position now maybe in this game that we have to do a great job protecting him and take a lot of things off his plate if Stephen Morris is the guy that we have to go to.
Offensively Maryland is doing a great job of running the football, controlling the ballgame, not turning the ball over a lot, which any time you're not turning the football over you can do some great things.
For us as a team we had to bounce back off a tough loss last week. Really don't know the status of Jacory Harris until later on today. He did not practice yesterday, and I don't think he'll practice today. Probably about a 75 percent chance that he will not be participating in this game this week, but like anything, we're excited about the process of Stephen Morris had in the last eight minutes of the game against Virginia, did a lot of great things in that game to give us the understanding that he's a guy that we can depend on.
We're not looking for him to win the game, we're looking for Stephen Morris just to manage the game, and some guys around him have to really step up and play some good defense.

Q. You actually filled us in pretty well on Jacory's status and Stephen. What is it about Stephen Morris that you like? What were the things that stood out about him when you recruited him? I'm sure he's thrown into the fire sooner than you would have liked, but the specific kinds of things that you liked that he did.
COACH SHANNON: Well, I'll go back when he was a junior year in high school at Monsignor Pace Senior High School. He did a great job because he had some great athletes around him. I think there was three or four guys that eventually went to South Florida. In his senior year he didn't have the kind of talent that he had the year before, and he took a lot of shots in the game time, a lot of big hits, got off the carpet, didn't get frustrated, kept motivating his guys to play and did a great job.
We were fortunate enough to be able to get him here in January. He started off the season as our fourth string quarterback, and about three or four years ago A.J. Highsmith got injured, and I said, let's get this young kid some work just in case things go bad and we have to use his year. But we weren't planning on it, but fortunately enough I did take it upon myself to do those things about three weeks ago.
Things that he's done, I mean, he threw an interception in the game, came back, just threw the football through the fall, managed the game well, made some correct checks, did some things in the game that you didn't expect a freshman to do, but then also he made some freshman mistakes. So I think when the guys watched him on the team and he kind of brought us can back with 19 points in the last eight minutes of the game, usually you don't see those things in a young kid, and with the blitz package Virginia was giving him, he responded and then we got three touchdowns in that short period of time.
We're happy, I'm happy, and I think the team is really excited getting the opportunity to play against Maryland this week and seeing what we can do.

Q. Is there a day of the week that you'll make a decision on Jacory if he hasn't able to practice by such-and-such a day?
COACH SHANNON: Usually with me, I'm always saying if you don't practice by Wednesday you're definitely not going to start. And then Thursday if you don't practice you're definitely not going to play. That's how I really run it. Like I said, he's about 80, 75 percent sure I doubt if he'll play this week.

Q. You've already actually touched on the question I was going to ask you about Jacory and his status, and assuming that Stephen does start on Saturday, how much of that playbook is going to be stripped out so that way he's got some basic plays to help build up his success and confidence on the field?
COACH SHANNON: Well, we're just going to run plays that he knows, that he can execute, and we're not going to throw the whole playbook out and say, okay, here's the three passing concepts, so learn those, here's the two running plays, learn those. But we've been getting a lot of work the last three weeks, so we've just got to figure out what he's comfortable with, what he's been able to run in practice, and we go back and evaluate since three weeks ago of watching tape and say, okay, here's the things that he executed in practice well and here's the things that he's executed in the game well and go from there.
There's some things we didn't run in the game that he's run very well, some things in camp, because we keep a lot of tape around. And we went back to August and evaluated some things he did well in those games, and then he came back and he bounced back, and we liked what he was doing. We've got plays that we can run that we haven't seen or shown which are going to be very key for us.

Q. Because you said how you wanted Stephen just to kind of manage the game, not necessarily win the game, does that mean you're looking for certain things from your running game or defense improvement wise from last week to help Stephen there?
COACH SHANNON: Well, yeah. The thing you've got to look for, we are successful when our defense is really playing well. The three losses that we have right now is that we weren't able to touch the quarterback. We didn't create turnovers, and we didn't take over the game in the second half on defense, and we have to do a better job of that.
Our defensive players need to do a consistent job in understanding that you win -- you can win games and things like that, but if you want to be a really great football team, not defensive, but football team, your defense has to step up to the challenge all the time under stressful situations, under any kind of situations, and we have to do a great job of that.

Q. How much did losing Jacory knock you guys back on both sides of the ball on Saturday?
COACH SHANNON: You know what, I must have mentioned on Tuesday, yesterday, that this was the first time, not for me but for these young kids to understand about losing a guy. That was the first time that I've been a head coach that we actually had someone carried off the football field that had to get some assistance. And when you lose a guy like Jacory who's well liked, well known, a leader, everybody believes in him no matter what the circumstances are that we're going to have an opportunity to win the game.
When that happened I think it shocked a lot of the football players on this team, and as a coaching staff, myself, we was trying to get time left step up and make a play and do those type of things. And I think this team finally realized that with about eight, nine minutes left to go in the game, they realized Jacory wasn't coming back, and everything started turning and clicking and Stephen started getting hot, and a lot of good things happened that we can build for this week's game.
But it really, really made I think an impact on this football team, and those things that as a football team growing, and you're just trying to put everything together, you understand those things happen. You just have to push through it.

End of FastScripts

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