|
|||
|
|||
|
 |
|
|
ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE MEDIA CONFERENCEOctober 16, 2013David CutcliffeDAVID CUTCLIFFE: I think the biggest concern or issue we have just as far as being something a little different for us, it's the seventh game of the year and only our second road game, so we've got to adjust gears quite a bit in that regard and focus ourselves into going and playing an ACC game on the road, which is always a huge challenge. Virginia is a very gifted, talented, big, physical team, which has always been a very difficult match‑up for us in that regard. We have to work hard on being a physical team ourselves. I think we used the open date a week ago prior to Navy. I think it really healed us, got us in a better frame of mind. Certainly I think our frame of mind is good, but after playing an option team, you still get yourself a little beat up. We do have Brandon Connette looks like he's better and back and capable, so that's been good news. Looking forward to seeing how our team takes this next challenge, and we'll see what happens. Q. Just from your perspective, wondering if you could say just how impressive it was to see Anthony come back and do what he did last week when he wasn't even expected to play. DAVID CUTCLIFFE: Well, he's a fine youngster, and I'll tell you, he's a very gifted competitor. He's a good athlete, obviously, he's a good football player, but he is such a fierce competitor. He and I have had a conversation about preparing himself as a starter while he was out, mentally and emotionally, and taking the time to go through his routine from a film study. I think he took that seriously and has done a great job of doing that. So he went into the game mentally prepared and emotionally prepared, and for him to play as well as he did physically was pretty amazing. Q. How does he make your offense better? DAVID CUTCLIFFE: Well, he really understands our offense. He gets us in the right play exceptionally well. He can run our offense from the line of scrimmage exceptionally well. He is a very accurate passer. He's a good decision maker, and then Anthony is a threat with his feet. He can extend a play, and he just gives us a ton of versatility as an offense. Q. With all these high‑scoring and diverse offenses these days in college football, how difficult is it to develop a dominant defensive squad? DAVID CUTCLIFFE: Well, there's not many of them out there, and we pretty much know‑‑ you see where most of them are. It starts with having mismatch problems up front. To be a dominant defensive team regardless of scheme, you've got to be able to mismatch people up front, and there's not a lot of those guys available and not a lot of those guys around. The next thing that you have to have is a lot of speed on the field. There's a lot of open‑field tackles that requires a great deal of athleticism, whether it be at linebacker, safety or corner. People that are comfortable with their front can play man‑to‑man as long as you've got the speed on the field and try to still outnumber people to some degree in the box, but it's hard. Who would have ever thought‑‑ and I'm not picking on them, it just hit me that night I was up late watching football when Southern Cal end up giving up 62 points. In my lifetime if somebody would have asked me if I thought University of Southern Cal would ever give up 62 points in a football game, I would have bet no, no way. And I think the other part of it is to be good on defense you really have to work on developing a mental toughness because you're going to give up plays, and it takes mentally tough people to keep your edge, and you've got to play defense with an edge. And to keep that emotional edge and still give up plays and sometimes big plays is a big challenge. Q. Obviously we know you as an offensive sort of genius. How much do you tinker and go over to the defensive side to kind of help them adjust and adapt to these various offensive styles? DAVID CUTCLIFFE: I'm doing it a lot more this year than I ever have. I really spent all of my time in there giving them an offensive coach's perspective, and then more and more thoughts on what has a chance to bother people. I look at all three phases completely on Sunday. I watch every snap of every team offensively that we play, kind of see what their approach is, what their plan is, and see if I can give them some thoughts as to what will cause them problems and what they're actually trying to do and what are the route combinations they're doing and then the run game, etcetera. It's a new era of football. It's interesting. It's challenging. I think it's fun. I'm enjoying it because of the challenge involved in it. But there's nothing easy about it. Q. Before your bye week you had consecutive games where you gave up anywhere‑‑ well, two games over 500 yards and then another 469, and then you go against Navy and you stop them with 319, forced a turnover inside your 10‑yard line. What was the difference for you defensively in the effort last week? DAVID CUTCLIFFE: Well, we had two weeks to prepare for the option. Our guys, the players and the staff, did a great job of utilizing our time. But we went right straight to tackling and getting off blocks and did a bunch of fundamental work that we needed to do, and it allowed us to do it, and we did some full‑speed work against our offense because we had to. And we're better than we played against Pitt and Georgia Tech. I can promise you. We intermittently played good in those games. What it came down to was not playing 60 minutes, and that was the other focus. I thought our coaches did a great job in the challenge that kind of came from me on both sides of the ball is the moment you step foot on the field‑‑ the only way we're going to learn to play 60 minutes is we have to play and practice at a high level. For however much time we have planned on that field, if it's an hour and 50 minutes, if it's 95 minutes, if it's 100 minutes, perform at a high level, and I thought for two weeks we did that as well as we've done it since we've been here, and we've tried to continue that theme this week, because our problems have come in clusters where we just lose that edge. I mentioned it a minute ago, defensively you're going to give up plays. You're going to give up some plays today. But your level of play, your focus, your tackling, your ability to play blocks has to come with an edge, and you can't lose that edge. I think we've done a good job of that on the practice field and hopefully we can continue that. Q. You were mentioning the fact that you're on the road for only the second time this year. What kinds of things go into shifting gears for road games, because you've got four of your last six on the road. What kinds of things are different about that? DAVID CUTCLIFFE: Well, you're just not in the same hotel, you're not eating the same foods. You've got to remember, pack this, carry this. Just getting into the routine of road games. We've got a lot of veterans that I think will do that well, but the coaches got to change. You get everything done by Thursday night that you normally may do if you're at home on Friday, and recruiting is so different than it used to be, we only have a certain number of evaluations. Used to be every assistant coach hit the road on Thursday anyway. Well, that's not the case. We have a lot of coaches that stay here and are with the team, almost all of them until we get to open dates or occasionally we have a guy go out local. It's just different than it used to be, and you kind of find that routine. We played well at Memphis, handled the road well. I expect us to do the same. But you've got to get back into that groove, and I kind of like the fact now that we're in it that four of the six are on the road. It'll be a little more normal for us. You just handle the distractions of the stadium and the crowd, and we should handle that fine. I expect a veteran team to not be bothered by that. I certainly hope so. Q. You just talked about going back to fundamentals with your defense. Do you find recruits these days coming out of high school are less fundamentally sound and knowledgeable about defense than maybe they are offense and that maybe you guys have to teach defense a little bit more now because of that? DAVID CUTCLIFFE: I think that a lot of coaches, offense sells tickets, and the best players sometimes nowadays want to play offense in high school. We've got defensive players that were offensive players in high school often. You're teaching them some of those things. I think the fundamentals of the game require some contact, and we're all conscious about how much contact that we have at practice. People have limited circumstances, us included, with spring practice and contact. So I think probably the young men that come out of high school programs, and it's not saying anything negative about any high school program, that they haven't had as much blocking and tackling work as people in years past. So not only do you want to teach safe technique, you want to teach effective technique. I do think that's a little more challenging today than what it once was. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
About ASAP Sports •
FastScripts Archive •
Recent Interviews •
Captioning •
Upcoming Events •
Contact Us
FastScripts | Events Covered | Our Clients | Other Services | ASAP in the News | Site Map | Job Opportunities | Links |
|
ASAP Sports, Inc. | T: 1.212 385 0297
|