|
|||
|
|||
|
 |
|
|
BIG TEN CONFERENCE MEDIA DAYSJuly 28, 2011Pat FitzgeraldCHICAGO, ILLINOIS THE MODERATOR: We're joined by Northwestern head coach, Coach Fitzgerald. We'll ask Coach Fitzgerald to make an opening statement and then take questions. COACH FITZGERALD: Thank you. Good afternoon. I hope everyone enjoyed lunch, doesn't let a food coma set in here. Excited about the experience coming back. Arguably the most experienced team we've had since I've been the head football coach, a group that's won as many football games as any other class in Northwestern football history. Looking forward to them reporting here in a couple days. Summer school wraps up and we'll get going next weekend. With that, how about we open it up to some questions. Q. You were a little dinged up in spring ball. Excluding Dan, how is the health of this team? COACH FITZGERALD: Based on the reports of our athletic training staff, we're as healthy as we've been. When you go through spring practice, you have 22-year-old young men on the field, there's a higher risk guys are going to get banged up. We take a pretty conservative approach in the offseason to where if we think a little bit of rest might be a better decision for the long term, we'll shut them down. That's what we did with some of our guys, especially with some of our veteran guys. Q. You had a unique perspective to offer Dan, then you have the opportunity to go forward and try to get something back your senior year. From your own personal experience, what did you try to pass on to Dan as he's trying to recover? COACH FITZGERALD: Number one, I wanted to talk to him about being patient, dealing with the rollercoaster. The first aspect is dealing with the fact that you're hurt and you can no longer play, what you're passionate about it's taken away from you. We dealt with that. Then he had to deal with the surgery, the initial rehab process of being immobilized. Kind of the steps you have to take. I'm not going to bore you with all of them. He's doing great. Everything is going well. He's going to come back to football not in the shape maybe the last time he played. That's going to be really frustrating. How you shake the rust off, look at it from a bigger perspective, yeah, you have to take it day-to-day. He's going to be back, it's going to be a little bit different because his body is going to operate a little bit different. He's a hundred percent healed from the standpoint of the surgery, now it's about adding the strength, getting the conditioning level up, getting back to having fun. I know he's chomping at the bit to play football again. Q. You talked about how experienced this team is. One of the most experienced group is the offensive line. What are you expecting from that group? COACH FITZGERALD: I think you ask every coach in the country what's critically important for you to be successful as a football team. It's the trenches. You have to have both sets of lines in place to have two fists in the fight. That's the way I look at it. To have 137 starts coming back in our offensive line, four returning starters on papers, then you talk about Deiters who started games, Bartells who started games for us, then the young depth that we have, I'm excited about that group. I challenged Adam Cushing, our O-line coach, that's great to have that experience coming back, but six months from now we'll have the youngest line in the Big Ten. It's important for him to develop that next group so we're ready for the future. It's going to come fast and furious. Q. Pat, in October you have three consecutive night games. Talk about that and how that does with your whole program when football normally has been meant to be played at 11:00, 1:00. COACH FITZGERALD: It's going to be a lot of fun. There's something fun, especially when those lights come on, it's a neat environment. Our fans are excited about it. We've gone around this summer, talked to our fans about it, talked to our team about Chicagoland. To be able to do some things with their kids in the morning, watch us play at night. Our guys are excited about it. For us, the Big Ten Network, the exposure that you give us from a media standpoint, we've benefited maybe from that most in the country. Our brand is seen worldwide and nationwide to the recruits. We're thankful for that. That nighttime exposure is critically important for recruiting. Q. (No microphone.) COACH FITZGERALD: Looking back, my personal experience, I'm not going to try to crystal ball how it will be for Dan. I'll be able to tell you more as we go through training camp. I got cleared to do anything in my lower body the first week in July. I had to go old school in training camp back in the day when the guys would be coming to training camp to get in shape. Now the guys are training 365 days a year. Danny is going to have to take camp Kenosha and get in the best shape of his life. It will be a little bit of different circumstances for him. As we visited yesterday, he's in a different place right now than he was mentally this time last year. He's also in a different place than he was physically. We're hopefully going to get that combination in the right order before the opener and he'll be ready to go. Q. (Question regarding non-conference schedule.) COACH FITZGERALD: We go on the road in the opener against a team at Boston College, 11 straight bowl games. There's no question in my 10 years as a head coach, this will be our most challenging opener. We've got to have a tremendous sense of urgency in camp, not only to improve and get to where we need to be, but to get to Boston College. A few weeks later we go back on the road to West Point to play the option, to play that kind of football team, the physicality, the effort level they play with, how well they're coached. The discipline they play with is going to be a challenge for us. A different set of circumstances from scheme. Sandwiched in between is an Eastern Illinois team. They're going to be hungry. It's going to be critically important, in my opinion, that we start fast. Q. In some respects it's been a rough couple of years for college football. Yet ratings and attendance and other markers, the game has never been more popular. You're a young coach. Do you have a sense of what might be done to clean up some of these issues? COACH FITZGERALD: I think first of all, like in any business, any family, any organization, you have to be held accountable for your actions and attitudes. When we make poor choices as people and individuals, no matter what it is, we have to learn from them, we have to grow. As an educator you have to teach your young people through that experience. When we make poor choices and decisions that impact above that teaching and coaching opportunity, we need to be held accountable for them. In this conference, the leadership we have, nationally, we're doing everything we can to take positive steps forward as we move on. It's disappointing maybe that's the way some feel. At the end of the day, I think it's not as commonplace to talk about all the positives, it's too easy to talk about all the negatives. Q. There's some shuffling at runningback last season. How do you feel about that group at this point? What degree of progression have you seen this off-season? COACH FITZGERALD: I like the way they progressed through spring practice. Mike Trumpy enters fall camp as our starter. The way that he finished the season is encouraging to me. Mike has good size, good speed, understands the concepts we're trying to do. He's going to be pushed by Adonis. Then Jacob Schmidt comes back off injury. As I look at the group as a whole, we have solid depth. We have to be more consistent there, number one, and start faster than we did a year ago. I would love to have a bell count, no question about that. You go back to when we had Tyrell, two-headed monster in Jason Wright, Noah Herron. Going back to my days with Darnell. I could go on and on with our great runningback tradition. Mike being a year older, Adonis being a year older, competitive depth, hopefully we'll have that accomplished. Talk is cheap; we have to go out and do it. Q. With the Ohio State controversy, there seems to be two schools of thought. One is that the scholarship is enough. Another school of thought says maybe there should be some type of financial compensation for athletes. As not only a coach, but former elite player, what are your thoughts on the developing controversy? COACH FITZGERALD: I wouldn't put myself in the elite player category, but thanks for the kind words. I think it's a hot topic right now nationally as I read what all of you write, what people talk about. I don't know if there's just one way to go about it. I'm not smart enough to come up with that idea. I think we have tremendous leadership in the NCAA, our president and athletic director level. If they ask us to get involved as coaches, I'd enjoy that. We need to help and provide I don't think our revenue players, the football and basketball players, but all of our athletes the opportunity, if they cannot go out and get a job to provide for themselves, then the opportunity through Pell grants. I think all those things need to be hashed out and discussed, let smart people come up with a plan if that's the direction we're going to go. Q. After Quinton Davie and Nate Williams graduated last year, who are you looking to step up in your linebacking core this year? COACH FITZGERALD: Two years ago I stood up here and was asked how I was going to replace our receiving core. I said we had a no-name wide receiver core. I'd like to put that to our no-name linebacker core and I'm not going to mention any of their names. At the end of the day you have to go out and prove it, do it on the field. We got a lot of work to do. We have a young group. Guys like Bryce McNaul and Ben Johnson have played a lot of football for us. It's time for that group of guys to step up. When they do, I'll start talking about them a little bit more. Q. Jeremy is a pretty well-known commodity at wide receiver. Who do you see stepping up within that group after him? COACH FITZGERALD: Jeremy Ebert is if not the top wide receiver, he's in that conversation in this conference. You can't forget about Drake Dunsmore. Drake has battled through a bunch of injuries. He's persevered. I know how excited he is. He was at dinner with our leadership council for kind of that last supper. I can see the look in his eye. Drake would be the weapon with the most experience. I like the spring that Charles Brown had as a senior. He's been a special teams player for us, but I thought he had a tremendous spring. Then Demetrius Fields had a very solid springs also. Lot of competition there. Pretty deep group. Add a pretty talented group of freshmen to it. We'll see how things progress in two-a-days. We play a lot of wide receivers. So we'll see how those guys progress. Q. I know you talked about it before, you talked about it at the end of last year, that junior class, now they're seniors. How much is on their backs as far as leadership goes? COACH FITZGERALD: Typically it's always on the seniors, but they can't do it alone. The biggest challenge they had to go through was the last two months, that's the summertime. I'll know that first week in August when the kids report where they're at from the standpoint of how they've invested, the chemistry and attitude our football program has going into camp. That dinner I had the other night with the leadership council, they feel they've accomplished the goals they had throughout the summer. We'll evaluate that. That's how we'll tweak and adjust our plan in training camp, how we're going to go. Most programs in the country, leadership starts and ends with your senior. This group is a win away from the all-time winningest group in our program. Typically in that senior year, you kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's a little bit more important to you than it was any other year. Not that it's important your freshman, sophomore and junior year, but it's that more important in your senior year. Q. As someone who has been in the Big Ten for a while, does it hurt the Big Ten as a whole, do you get any distress from seeing Ohio State go through tough times? COACH FITZGERALD: Well, I think just as a college football fan, first, before I can speak about that, you want to see young men come into our programs as coaches, as fans, so on and so forth, that are going to make great choices. When you don't make great choices at the player level, if choices aren't great at the coaching or administration level, it's disappointing. I'd say that about any organization, any family. There's a lot that's going on right now in college football that I think we need to wrap our arms around as a complete and total body. We will. We'll make it better. There are going to need to be changes, tweaks, adjustments, to bylaws and rules, I would think so based on what we've seen in the last off-season. I don't think there's a coach or administrator in the country that doesn't want to be a part of that solution. As we work through it, as it was alluded to earlier, the game has never been watched or supported at this level. I think we're all thankful for that. It's all on us as stewards of the game to make sure we leave it in the right spot as we move it forward, while we're in it and also as it comes after us. Hopefully we'll continue to do that in a positive vein. THE MODERATOR: Thanks a lot, coach. COACH FITZGERALD: Thank you. 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
|