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ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE MEDIA CONFERENCE

September 21, 2011

Mike London

MIKE FINN: We now welcome Virginia's head coach Mike London. We'll ask for a brief opening statement and go to questions.
COACH LONDON: Good afternoon. We're excited about the opportunity now to basically have kind of a four-game stretch here after being on the road the last couple weeks.
We're excited about the opportunity to try to get back on the winning track with a better performance than what we had against North Carolina last week.
Players are upbeat. As I said, the preparation continues for this upcoming game.

Q. I'm sure Virginia has had some previous four-game home stands. When you originally saw this, was this all positive or are there some negatives to playing four games in a row at home?
COACH LONDON: I didn't look at it as positive or negative. The opportunity to play at home, you would hope and think they're positive, particularly in our case as a young team, or team in transition.
We just look at it as an opportunity to create the routine of when you are playing at home, hopefully parlay that into an excellent effort, excellent execution, all those things.
We're really looking at this game, even though it's the first game of that four-game home stand, we're looking at this game as the first game with an opportunity for us to play well and play well in front of our fans and do well and hopefully win a football game. That's all we're looking at basically now.

Q. The Southern Miss offense is up-tempo. How do y'all match that? Talk about Chase Minnifield and how strong he is as a senior at this point.
COACH LONDON: Southern Miss has a prolific offensive attack because they have a guy that's a great quarterback, a guy that broke Brett Favre's passing record, touchdown throws. He's been there for a while. He has such a command of the offense, his surrounding cast, from the runningbacks to wide receivers. He's allowed them to do well in attacking horizontal and vertical space. They're good at doing what they do.
Defensively, multiple front. They do a lot of things. Very athletic on film.
We have to play well. There's a lot of things they make you have to do by the up-tempo. They limit your substitution opportunities, things like that.
On the other side, Chase Minnifield has been a guy, our go-to kind of guy, a leader that has shown the capability to be a pretty good player throughout all of college football. Chase is one of the hardest working guys on our team, very conscientious about his preparation for games. With the bloodlines, with his dad playing in the NFL, you see all those things, all those attributes that his father had. Chase brings it to our team and brings it to the other young corner playing, Nicholson.
Chase is an outstanding young man. I know he's excited about playing against an offense that is a very balanced offense that runs but also throws the ball in the air.

Q. Can you fill me in on Kevin Parks. He's obviously having a great start to his career. What does he do well and what makes him so effective?
COACH LONDON: I think Kevin, he's a football player that can run in between the tackles and can run outside of tackles and he can catch the ball out of the backfield. He's so compact. His size, 5'8", is something you may think of as a detriment. He gets behind a big offensive line, finds a hole or a crease, next thing you know he's running through that crease and that hole full speed ahead. He's one of the strongest guys on our team, particularly in the squat category.
Again, another young man that had great high school accolades, but another young man that knows he'll be a superstar here. He's sharing carries with our team captain and starter Perry Jones, also sharing backfield touches with Clifton Richardson, another true freshman.
But Kevin has a bright future in front of him because he knows and studies the game and he's passionate about playing the game.

Q. You had 10 players who caught passes against North Carolina. You had another game this year where 11 guys caught a pass in the game. Is that by design that you want to spread the ball around that much?
COACH LONDON: I think it is. I think it's by design we take whatever teams give us. Based on the particular routes, whatever the receiver is running, it becomes the possibility and the progression in the quarterback's reads.
We played a lot of people. We throw the ball to the backs out of the backfield. We rotate several wide receivers, try to distribute the ball to them. We throw to the fullback. We'd like to continue to throw to our tight end.
I think the multiple throws to the different position groups are something that's within the offensive scheme, but more so dictated by what the defense tends to give us.
We'll continue to keep throwing the ball where they're not or throwing the ball, again, where the coverage dictates.

Q. Looks like out of your group of wideouts in particular Kris Burd seems to be the leader of that group.
COACH LONDON: He's been around a long time. He's been in a lot of games. He's coming off a year where he had over 50 catches last year, kind of a go-to guy. Timmy Smith got injured a little bit and Kris is the veteran of the group. He's responded well to the fact that other receivers, other options as far as throwing the ball. He hasn't pouted or sulked or anything like that. He's a consummate team player.
I think there's also recognition that since he's one of our best that we can make sure we try to get the ball to him, too, create more options for him. That's what we'll try to do as we start moving forward.

Q. Mike, how much have you showed the team or have you showed the team at all the footage from 2009, showing, Hey, look, this is what they did?
COACH LONDON: Not much because two years ago, different styles, philosophies. There are some players on our team that played in that game, maybe two or three of them might have had a hand in playing 15, 20 plays or more. Everyone else is concentrating on the fact we watch the tapes of the games they played this year and how well they play and how hard they play.
History has shown that Virginia went down there and got beat. Those guys remember that. That was probably like almost, what, 28 games ago, two years and a couple games ago.
I think the biggest thing now is where we are at 2-1, chance at home playing against a team that went to a bowl game last year, with very good players, having to play well. We played a team last week that was a good team, that if you don't execute on the four or five plays that make the difference in the game, we know playing another good team from a very good conference, like I said, with the style of offense they have, we have to play our best. That's probably the biggest thing right now, just taking care of us.
MIKE FINN: Coach, we're out of time. Thanks for being with us. Good luck this weekend. We'll talk to you next Wednesday.
COACH LONDON: Thank you.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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