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ROSE BOWL GAME: OHIO STATE VS WASHINGTONDecember 29, 2018Ben Burr-KirvenPasadena, California Q. What was your favorite part of the trip? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: Galaxy ride. Drop tower, you go up, drop really fast. Scary. Q. How are you going to keep Ohio State off the field? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: Hopefully we're going to play some good defense. They're a really good offense. They have an explosive quarterback and runningback, receivers. Hopefully we got the guys to match them in the scheme to handle it. We got a good challenge ahead of us, but hopefully we can get it done. Q. Will you put a lot of pressure on the quarterback early? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: I think we'll probably mix it up, try to confuse him a little bit, not give him too much he can key in on. Have some stuff dialed up. Q. Top of the Pac-12 again. How does it feel? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: It's really special. Every year our goal is to win the Pac-12 because you can't do anything if you don't win your conference. Meant a lot to win the conference championship, put up another one on the ring at the stadium. Q. You are the underdogs. Why do you think you have a chance? What are the intangibles? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: I think people love to look down on the Pac-12. I think we're used to that. I don't think we worry too much about being the underdog. It's more fun to go out there, prove people wrong. We know the talent we have. We've all been here for almost four years. We have an old team of talented guys, can play with anyone in the country. Depends whether we can show up and play the ball we can. Q. What was your favorite moment of the season? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: Probably beating Wazzu in the snow. Beating the rival in the snow is pretty fun. That was pretty awesome. Q. Obviously you're coming on the tail end of a pretty remarkable season. Ohio State was talking about you earlier. What is it about this defense, this linebacking corps? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: I think it starts with the scheme. Coach Lake has done a good job of understanding what our strengths and weaknesses are. The D-line does a good job of letting me run around, Greg Gaines does a good job of keeping them off me. It's been a special year, but it just comes down to execution. We know what we need to do, the plays we got to make. There's things you got to do at linebacker, you got to make tackles. At the end of the day I'm just doing my job. Q. A few close losses. What was it about this group of players that allowed you to sort of come together? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: I think we're a pretty veteran group, most of our team is juniors or seniors. When you go through stuff like that, you need to be able to bounce back. A lot easier when you played ball for a couple years, you understand the nature of this game. Sometimes you're going to lose games you don't think you're going to lose. At the end of the day you will. Fortunately we had a lot of guys that understood there's so much to play for after those games. We knew we were still playing for the Pac-12 championship. If you do that, you get to go to the Rose Bowl. I don't think anyone ever thought about backing down. Q. Is there an element for you guys to go and show how physical you can be? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: I think the nature of football is most of these teams want to be the ones that win the game. I think it's hard for us to go into this game and not want to be physical. If you go out there and play soft, you're going to lose the football game no matter who you're playing. It is our opportunity to go out there and show in the Pac-12 we play good football, because a lot of people don't think we do. A great program like Ohio State, so storied, it will be a great game. Q. For people in Ohio, if you were to describe why your defense has been successful this year, what is it about it? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: I think it starts with our coaching. I think we probably have one of the best coaching staffs on defense. Coach Lake is a really special guy, our coordinator. Done a great job of finding little things we can do each week to continue to tweak on offenses. Our secondary is probably going to be guys that are going to be drafted this year. We have the talent, we have the game plan to execute. I think at the end of the day we got some guys that can do some stuff. The coaches put us in position to make the plays. Q. We know Dwayne Haskins. You've played some good quarterbacks. I was asking Jake about your defense. He was talking about the way guys make plays on the ball. How would you describe the level of confidence you have going against a really good quarterback? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: Yeah, I mean, obviously Haskins is a really talented guy. Someone who goes to the Heisman Trophy presentation has to be pretty good. Put on the tape, he's everything you expect him to be. Super live arm, makes all the throws, pretty mobile. I think it's going to be a good test for us. We know he'll make plays. No games where he's getting stuffed by anybody. At the end of the day we have to hope we can make more plays than he does. Pretty good test for us. Q. Can your corners and safeties win battles in the air? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: Yeah. We have some ball hawks in our secondary. If I look back, it's a one-on-one jump ball, that kind of situation, tons of confidence in those guys. Q. It's hard to talk about yourself. If you tried to explain your ability to get to the ball, make a tackle, a play, is that film study, natural instinct? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: I think it's a mix of everything. It has to start in the film room. You got to understand what a team is going to try to do to attack you. Every week it's a little bit different. They're still trying to move the ball down the field. To play linebacker, there are some innate instincts that come with it, the nature of the position. You have to be able to sort things out and find the ball. I've been here four years, spent a lot of time with these coaches. They've done a great job of finding things every year to tweak to help me get to get better. The D-line does an incredible of eating up double-teams, keeping me free. If I'm free, can run to the ball, I can most of the time get there and make the tackle. Q. Two years ago two teams that lost the playoff semifinals, you guys and Ohio State. What did that do for your program? What does it do for a program? Did that help this program, show what the level is? Was it a downer in the off-season? Would you rather go to a bowl and win than a playoff and lose? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: Yeah, I think there's definitely positives. Obviously it sucked to lose. You want to go play for the national championship. I think in the long run it's helped this program a lot. It's showed a lot of guys, most of us who are here now were sophomores, freshmen. It showed us what we can do as a program. There's no level we can't play at. Going there meant a lot to the guys. It's something that hopefully in the next couple years we're going to see guys go back there. You can see it in the program, guys we're recruiting now, versus when I first got here. It definitely hurt when we lost that. It definitely is a good thing in the long run. Q. Why is Chris Petersen good? Why is he a great coach? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: I think it starts with just his relationship with us as the players. A lot of coaches, it's easy to get caught up in the football side of it. He takes so much out of his time to make sure we really understand there's so much more to football, so much more to life than just being a football player. I think guys trust him so much, put so much faith into him as our coach. We know he cares a lot about us more than what we can do between the lines. When you have that kind of trust in a relationship with your coach, it makes it a whole lot easier to trust him when you're going out on the field. Obviously he's a great coach, tactician, that kind of stuff. The relationships he forms, the things he teaches us outside of football are more than what a normal coach does. Q. How much does he get in your face? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: He'll get fired up a little bit if you make a mistake here or there. He is definitely somebody that you don't want yelling at you. He's pretty fiery when he gets going, but he's a great guy. Q. If you look at the two teams, it seems like you could have the same record, they won a couple close games, you all lost some close games that you easily could have won. Do you feel there's a certain evenness? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: Yeah, I think obviously like you said, we had some -- all of our losses were five, four points, that kind of stuff. Definitely a couple plays here and there and all of a sudden we might have 12-1, that kind of record. I think we're obviously both really good teams. We kind of had a year that we didn't expect. We didn't expect to be 9-3. At the end of day it's what happened. Still one more game to play. At this point you throw the records out the window. We're here now, got a game to play regardless. Q. What do you attribute not giving up more than 24 points to? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: I think it starts with our coaching staff. They do a pretty incredible job week in and week out. We have our base defense stuff, we always do. Every week there's always little tweaks you can make, changes that Coach Lake finds on film. The way that works for us, obviously it's working out good. We have the guys that are able to execute. That's one of the hardest parts about college football, finding guys that are smart enough every week to be able to roll with the punches, understand it's not going to be the same thing over and over, plug-and-play. It helps having a veteran group like this, been through that, understands there's a lot more to football than run and hit. You have to think between the ears. Guys are playing and understanding the nuances of the game. Q. You have 30 plus guys from California. What is it about this state? How important is this state to recruit? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: I think college football, if you look at the recruits across the whole country, a lot of kids from California. One of the premier places to play football when you're in high school. California and Texas are really spots. When you're a West Coast school like we are, hard to get to Texas and get those kids to want to come up. Our coaching staff does a really good job of trying to come down and steal guys away from the California schools. There's a lot of talent down here. Look at our team, every position, there's a couple guys from California. I think it's just the nature of college football. There's a whole lot of good football being played in California and coaches are going to come find it. Q. Junior high on, it's really competitive here in California? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: Yeah, I think it's just how it is. I think it's kind of one of those things once it starts going, you get a tradition of it. I'm from the Bay Area, we have De La Salle up there, come down here, Trinity league. It's just tradition. Once that happens, it's kind of hard to get away from it because kids want to play here, they want to play for these teams that have been great for years and years. It's one of those things where once you get going, you have the kids, so many people that live in our state, it definitely helps there. Yeah, just the nature of high school football. Q. Statistically you are pretty much one of the top defenses. What is it like playing Ohio State, offensively at the same level? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: Yeah, I think it's fun. You want to get to play the best competition in the country. When you look at the stats, put on the tape, they are one of the best offenses we have seen all year. Probably the best if we're being honest. Coach Lake, he's in the film room all day trying to find where the holes are, the weaknesses. It's tough when you play a team like this. You look at the film, you don't see something jump off the page, this is where we're going to attack. It's fun for us. You know you're playing the guys that are the best in the country, and that's what we want. Q. Haskins can run, but he's not like a dual threat guy. Do you prefer playing a team with a dropback passer? BEN BURR-KIRVEN: It's probably a little more fun when they don't run as much because that puts a little bit more stuff I got to do. Obviously from the tape, he does run when he needs to. He's pretty good at it. In terms of making my life easier, it's a little bit easier when you don't have to be 20 yards downfield covering the receiver. He's a talented guy, I know he will run. It definitely is better for us if we don't have to spend all day chasing him around. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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