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ROSE BOWL GAME: IOWA VS STANFORDDecember 28, 2015Josey JewellPasadena, California Q. The Tax Slayer Bowl was that a big moment for you? Do you feel like where something clicked there? You seemed like you were all over the place and no one else really was. JOSEY JEWELL: That was a big learning point. I was obviously young. To get our butts kicked like that kind of helped us. I'd like to think it helped us this year improving any way we could. We just worked our butt off through the off-season, understanding we don't want what happened last year to happen again this year. Just understand we can do a lot better than that, if we work on the small detail things. Q. Did Michigan State prepare you for these guys? That's just sort of a sense I have in terms of smart quarterback, power offense type thing. JOSEY JEWELL: There were a few things you can compare them with. They like the power. They got some big offensive line. That's a great thing, I think we had going for us when we played Michigan State. Hopefully just get us more ready for Stanford. Q. So the Stanford quarterback has been there four years, very smart guy. Is there a dynamic of you guys trying to outsmart each other or anything like that? There's gotta be something of that. Figure out what they're doing? JOSEY JEWELL: Yeah. Just I guess looking at your reads, maybe understanding what's the possible play they could run out of that, just understanding where everybody else is going to be on the defense. Just relying on the coach to put us in position and we're just reading from there and just trying to do to the best of our ability. Q. Different topic, do you hear from Pat Angerer at all? He's been on Twitter the last month or two. JOSEY JEWELL: Yeah. He's been around every once in a while. He was around I think it was springtime he was with us lifting and talking about receiving help. (Inaudible). He's a great guy. He's the best guy (inaudible). Q. That's not what he says. JOSEY JEWELL: Oh, I know. I love talking to him as a person and football player. He's just a great guy and great player overall. Q. Do you see similarities in your games? Can you see that, why people compare you guys? JOSEY JEWELL: Maybe. I don't know. I just try to focus on the small things. I try to focus on doing my job and putting everybody in their position. So I don't know if we do some of the things or not. That would be fine for me if we did. Q. Everyone talks about your closing speed and even Coach Ferentz had said it almost surprises him how fast you get from point A to point B. Where does that come from? JOSEY JEWELL: I ran a lot of track and field back in high school. I was pretty small and pretty fast, stuff like that. But speed is faster for me on the football field, seeing reads and sprinting to that position or sprinting to that play. Maybe it's being on the football field than on a track more than anything like that, because I was never that fast. I've never been that fast of a guy, but I've grown here the last couple of years here in my strength and agility. Q. This will be your school record 14th game. No one has ever played 14 games in one season at Iowa. How much physical capital do you guys spend in those 13 games? It seemed like especially that 22-play drive at Michigan State, it was like that was it. JOSEY JEWELL: It was very taxing. You could say it wears on your body. You have bumps and bruises on certain areas of your body where you have to get treatment and rest. A lot of it's just staying focused and not going out on Friday and Saturday night. Just understanding if you want to get better, if you want to get healthier and become a better football player, you gotta take away those maybe fun times, Friday, Saturday night and make them even more special on Saturday night be with football. You just gotta spend your time and manage your time depending on where you want to be to where you want to go. Q. You're the youngest guy in the leadership group, I believe; right? You're only a sophomore. JOSEY JEWELL: I'm not sure. Q. Do you feel like that gives you a little bit of a voice, I mean, more of a voice? JOSEY JEWELL: With those kind of things I try to stay quiet. I let the juniors talk. They've been here the longest and they understand everything. I'm just trying to follow in their footsteps, you know, learn from them and their experiences how to become a better person and better football player. Q. In the locker room who's the leading voice in there outside of the coaches? JOSEY JEWELL: There's not really one. It's just all of us, I guess. Travis Perry and Cole Fisher have the deepest voice in the room. So that could be the two right there. They've been here the longest. They understand what's going on. They've been through all the ropes and everything. Those are two guys that we look up to, and when they voice their opinion, we listen to them. Q. [On going pro early and Desmond King's potential draft stock...] JOSEY JEWELL: I mean, if it was ever to come to that, I think I'd try to finish the opportunity here. His [Desmond's] value is pretty high right now. Whatever he does, we'll respect that. He's got a lot of accomplishments. Q. [On reading body language on the line...] JOSEY JEWELL: Yeah, there's a bunch of small things that you can see, depending on the guy. Like you said, getting up close on him or just his body language as a whole. You can read that and understand whether he's tired, whether he's ready to go or whether he's getting beat down. So there's a lot of things you can look at there, and if you're winning the battle, you can usually tell who's beat up. There's the small things like that. You don't want to start off with that language. You want to stay straight up. You want to act like you're ready to go, you're 100 percent there. But it's hard when you're tired sometimes. (Inaudible). But you know you're ready to go and 100 percent. Q. [On going against Josh Garnett...] JOSEY JEWELL: Going against Scherff in my freshmen year, everybody is still big, but he was huge. Yeah, you're going to have those 320-pound guys on you all night. Q. [On time of possession...] JOSEY JEWELL: Possession is huge because every game they play, I think they have 37 or so per game. It's just huge and we gotta help take care of that as a defense and get our offense the ball, and hopefully we can bring more time of possession on offense. Q. Is that the one thing, the 22-play drive against Michigan State, it's the one thing I guess you want to get off your backs? JOSEY JEWELL: It's going to be huge coming into this game and making that happen and hopefully giving the ball back to our offensive line. Q. [On Stanford's offensive line...] JOSEY JEWELL: I mean they're a great offensive line. They got some really good players on their offensive line and they got some guys behind them that can play. They're just another good offense, not to say that they're not any better than anybody else. But yeah, playing in the Big Ten we do have big offensive linemen. I mean, they're very good and we've seen that on film. We've seen how they block guys, how they wall people off. So they're a great offensive line and we have to be ready to come and play. Q. [On Joshua Garnett..] JOSEY JEWELL: Yeah. He's a great offensive lineman. He can work you in a lot of ways. So you just gotta have proper leverage and understand what he can do to you and play off him. Q. [Continued...] JOSEY JEWELL: I don't know if I have. I've seen a lot of plays from him. Q. [Continued...] JOSEY JEWELL: Yeah. You just gotta do the small things right, especially against him. He's a guy that puts you in your place. So I mean stay low, be aggressive because he's going to be out there to get you on that offensive line. He's going to be out there to get you. Q. [Continued...] JOSEY JEWELL: Yeah. Understand you're a little bit quicker than those guys to get around them. You gotta use that to your advantage. We gotta just understand what we can do, understand our ability and understand their ability. Q. [On Stanford's physical size...] JOSEY JEWELL: I mean, they got a lot of things they can throw at you. With extra two linemen, extra three linemen, putting the lineman on fullback. There's a lot of things they can do. We've seen it and we haven't seen it. So they have some variety we haven't seen still and it's going to be very interesting going up against it and making adjustments to the defensive. So we just gotta be ready for the small things. Q. [Continued...] JOSEY JEWELL: I don't know if there's a huge difference, or there's one big or one that shouts out at me. A lot of guys on the line sometimes on the third and short or the goal line, they have a five man to one side, all offensive linemen, which is very powerful, positive side of the offense. And we just have to be ready to make the small adjustments, move people over, put our defensive players in the right position. Q. [On preparing for Christian McCaffrey in practice...] JOSEY JEWELL: Yeah. You got one really good running back that he can play ball in our scout team. But he's already home right now. He's given us great looks, but there's not something you can really do. He's one of the best out there. So we just gotta take what we can from our scout team guys and still expect a little more. Q. How closely do you follow the Heisman ranks and were you surprised that McCaffrey didn't win considering the fact he broke Barry Sanders' record? JOSEY JEWELL: I don't follow Heisman too much. But yeah, he's a great running back and so is the Alabama running back. They're all great players, when you get to be a finalist out there. But yeah, he did a great job breaking that record. That was a huge record by such a great player. So I don't know if it surprised me. They're all just good players up there when they get to the finalist kind of thing. So I don't have much knowledge of that kind of stuff. Q. People weren't aware of McCaffrey early in the season. Were you? JOSEY JEWELL: That's the same for me. I didn't really hear much about him until the Heisman race started coming about. So yeah, that's when I heard the most about him breaking records? Q. Why's that? JOSEY JEWELL: I think maybe under the radar. I don't know if he had a lot of recognition until the Heisman stuff came about. But he's a great player. We've seen him on film and we just gotta be ready for him. He's a great player. Q. [On stopping Stanford's offense...] JOSEY JEWELL: Yeah. We just gotta be ready, even with that, it's the same as our linemen, we gotta be ready with leverage and understand where we can be and understand where our defensive players are going to be at the time, because they're all a bunch of great players, veterans. We gotta be playing the right leverage and we gotta be playing the right area, understand where they can hurt us and where they can't. Q. Stanford comes out with empty back field or maybe like three wide outs and two tight ends, how comfortable are you in dealing with something like that given you haven't faced it too often in the BIG TEN? JOSEY JEWELL: Yeah, we don't face a ton of that. Maybe a couple of games we had five wide small backs. Just some adjustments we can make and understand in our defense what we can do and what we can't do. Q. How do you feel about the blitz pressure you can get against Stanford? JOSEY JEWELL: We tried to work a couple of them in our blitz team. So we just gotta understand where we can be and what holes we can go in and where they can hurt us if we do blitz coverage-wise. Q. Along those lines, your quarterback starting the Rose Bowl, he commands the offense. He can make a lot of shifts in the line. Is there a concern there? JOSEY JEWELL: Yeah. We're going to have to play fundamental ball against them. He's a great player and he knows what he's doing. He sees different coverages, different blitzes. He's seen them four years now, five years. He was a redshirt. Is that correct? Yeah. He was a redshirt. So I mean, he's a great player and we just gotta understand that he'll be able to jump like a lot of things that we do. Q. And along those lines, as a defense playing against a younger quarterback, do you feel you can take advantage a little bit? JOSEY JEWELL: Yeah. They have less experience. So that does hurt them a little bit. And also the quarterback coming into the game with how smart they are, where they came from, how used to the offense are they? They played in high school and they played the same offense. So yeah, experience helps a lot as quarterback. And it's going to be huge in this game. I understand he's a fifth-year senior and he understands what's going on. Q. The Stanford offensive guys have been saying your defense is not complex schematically. You guys execute really well and I think the offense would describe themselves like that. Does that really make the mental game or the decisions and things like that make it a little easier on you guys? JOSEY JEWELL: Yeah. You gotta read your guards, read your back, read everything in the game. We just gotta have those pre-snap reads like you said. We gotta have them down to a T and understand what in certain coverages and certain formations they come out and what kind of plays they can run from that formation. They'll see our defense and sometimes what we're in and where they can hurt us. Q. [Continued...] JOSEY JEWELL: There's some tendencies. But that's with a lot of things, same personnel groups and certain forms, what they like to do a lot and sometimes what they like to hide, too. We just have to take advantage of that and watch film. Q. Which younger guys have stepped up? JOSEY JEWELL: Jack Hockaday. There's Nick Wilson who's popped up. They've been getting better every day, every developmental period we do, after every practice. We just get big drills from them when they come out. Q. Wilson is crazy, crazy strong. JOSEY JEWELL: That dude is a freako athlete. He can squat, he can do all the lifting very well. He's kind of freakish in that aspect. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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