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ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE MEDIA CONFERENCEApril 25, 2013Jim GrobeCOACH GROBE: Thank you. Good to get spring practice done. I thought we had a very competitive spring. We stayed pretty healthy, which was a good thing. Had good competition. I think we know a lot. We're a better football team right now, so I think it was a good spring. We need to have a good off‑season here before we come back in July. But I'm excited about our football team.  I think we've got a good group of guys that are pretty close and work really hard this spring. Q. Did you guys have a number two receiver emerge this spring? COACH GROBE: We kind of let the players vote on some different things at the end of spring. I usually don't do that kind of stuff. I'm not real touchy‑feely about some of those things. But our guys, everybody almost unanimously felt Orville Reynolds had the best spring on offense. Just completely different guys, catching the ball really well. He's kind of embraced the slot position. Without camp going through spring as much as we love camp and we know he can play, I thought it was a perfect scenario for Orville to show whether he could play or not. He had a great spring. Did some good things running the football, catching it. Just a completely different kid from what we've had the past couple of years. So I do think we have a guy that can back‑up Campanaro. But what he's done for us is he's probably made us look at having two slots on the field sometimes. Q. Wondering if you ever sit back and contemplate the ACC of today versus the ACC when you took the Wake job or the ACC when you played? Can you even name all the teams now? COACH GROBE: It's tough and getting tougher and tougher. You know, I thought when I played at Virginia, I thought the ACC was pretty tough back then. Then when I came to Wake I thought, wow, it's so much tougher with Florida State in it. Then when we add the three teams to that, and you add Miami and Virginia Tech and Boston College, I thought, oh, my goodness. We've really ramped it up. Now with Pitt, Syracuse and Louisville coming in and of course then we're going to be playing Notre Dame once in a while, it's just so competitive now. It's really made our jobs a lot tougher. But it's made our jobs more exciting. So I think it's good to see the profile of the league getting better and better. But it certainly keeps you up at night thinking about all the great teams that you're going to have to tee it up with. Q. I think you successfully named all the teams there. COACH GROBE: Well, you know once in a while I get it right, not very often. Q. Coming out of spring, what area do you feel pretty good about, and what area do you still have concerns about going into the fall? COACH GROBE: Well, we didn't do a lot with the kicking game this spring. We, I think we've got some kids that will do a good job with our coverage teams and block teams and those sort of things. We didn't ask our guys to kick a whole lot this spring. We worked our specialists a little bit. But that's probably my biggest concern coming back in August that we've got to get right after that. I think offensively Tanner Price had a really good spring. I think we're asking him to do a few more things that we've done in the past, and I think that's going to help us as an offense, and I think that will help him be a little more versatile. Defensively we really didn't do a lot this spring. We played a lot of base stuff, and we just wanted to see if our guys could get off blocks and go make plays. As spring went on, they got better at that. I thought we had a really good fundamental spring. Coming back, probably our emphasis starting in August will be jumping right into special teams and working those a little bit harder than we did this spring. Q. Coming off last season, do you leave spring practice thinking, okay, I feel a lot better about this team than I did going into spring practice, or do you still wonder how good this team will be in the fall? COACH GROBE: No, I think that's right. I thought last year we were a bowl‑capable football team. We dropped the ball in the middle of the season, lost a couple games that I thought were within reach. By the end of the year we were not a very good football team. We had some behavior issues that ran the middle of the season. Then we had a lot of injuries. By the end of the year, we really weren't a good football team. The good news is a lot of those kids that were banged up are back. We get them healthy and have a good August. I felt great about the spring. I really feel like we potentially have a good football team. We always play a great schedule, so that is a little bit of an issue. You never know how you're going to fare against the team that's you're going against. But I'm very encouraged coming out of spring. We had some young kids that stepped up and really did some good stuff this spring. Even had some surprises like Orville Reynolds. I mentioned Orville Reynolds, and some of the guys that really stepped up a guy on defense. Des Floyd, the defensive end that we really didn't know what owe to think of, had a great, great spring and looks like he's going to play a lot for us. Had some good surprises, and coming out of spring we're very encouraged about going into the fall. Q. You mentioned Tanner Price having a good spring and asking him to do more. He started as a freshman a couple years ago and threw for a lot of yards at the time. But can you talk about the evolution of his game as he gets more experience and adds to it? COACH GROBE: You know, I think what we did is we really tried to make Tanner, Riley Skinner. He's got some great attributes. One of the attributes he's got is he runs a lot better than Riley did. Riley didn't have very good foot speed, but he's really good at the control foot game. Lot of the underneath stuff, and we were able to move the sticks a lot with him hitting the short passes. Where Tanner is more of an intermediate to down‑the‑field guy. We've really got to get back to running the football. The key to that is having him run the football. We did that as a freshman, then we got him knocked out at Florida State running the football. It panicked us a little bit. Then we went back to being more of a pocket football team and making him throw the football all the time. You know, you really need a good offensive line and a great group of receivers to do that. I think a couple years ago we probably got lulled to sleep because we had Chris Givens, and Mike Campanaro, and a veteran offensive line. We made a lot of hay throwing the football. But this past year when we weren't as strong at receiver and had all those issues with injuries and whatnot on the offensive line, we just put too much on Tanner to throw the football. So we've got to get back to where we know Tanner can throw the football, but we've got to get back to where we don't live and die with the throw game. I think asking him to run the football more is going to be the thing that our offense needs. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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