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TOSTITOS FIESTA BOWL: KANSAS STATE v OREGONDecember 30, 2012Nick AliottiGLENDALE, ARIZONA THE MODERATOR: Questions, please. Q. How has practice been so far? Is the team seeing any rust at all? COACH ALIOTTI: There was maybe a little rust on day one. You forget there's an hour difference, just that little bit of hour difference, so they're getting up a little bit earlier and stuff. I think as the week has gone on, the rust is coming off. Felt really good about the way we've practiced and paid attention to everything we need to do. It's tough, a lot of times you go on a road trip, eight or nine days in a hotel. It's not an excuse. Bottom line is I feel good about the way we've practiced and paid attention to meetings. It's been smooth up to this time, knock on wood. Q. What's the mix between working on the game plan? COACH ALIOTTI: Well, it's never 100% done. We put in I'd say 99.9% of our game plan before we left Eugene. We had a week of practice. Say we're going to play on Saturday, we have three days of practice, like we would in a normal week. Bottom line is, it was in before we got here. Now it's a matter of seeing it over and over and over again, through meeting, practice, individual drills, repetition. I think we'll be very well‑prepared, you know, going into the game. I believe Kansas State will be also. Well‑coached, good football team. Then obviously there's always, with the month, the 35 days of time off, these offenses, they're kind of tricky, shady. The beauty of the offense, they can put in new things, personnel groups, plays you haven't seen, and you can't call timeout if you haven't seen it before. Defensively you have to prepare for war in a time of peace all the time. Bottom line is hopefully we'll be prepared for whatever they throw at us. Comes down to blocking, tackling, reading your keys, playing football. Q. Spoken very highly of Collin Klein. COACH ALIOTTI: He's very good. He runs that offense efficiently. He's a poised guy. Appears to be a very smart football player. He knows what they want him to do in their game plan. He can run. I've stated this a number of times. Mobile quarterbacks can extend football plays, and he's one of those, for sure. That's always an extra added, I won't use the word 'problem,' because there usually should be a solution to a problem, but that does become something you have to be concerned with when a quarterback can extend plays and make something happen with his feet. Q. Is it helpful that maybe the offense runs around him? He's obviously going to run the ball. Does it help you to game plan knowing he runs a lot? COACH ALIOTTI: Well, he's the catalyst, that's for sure. I'd say a lot like two years ago, Cam Newton, that offense at Auburn ran through Cam Newton. They're similar offenses, then there's a lot of differences, too. But the bottom line is you know that the offense is going to run through Collin Klein, which is good for Kansas State, because they're getting the ball in their best player's hand every down. He's the guy that's the general. He's the guy that gets to call the shots. But it's also we know that's the case, too. We're going to have to see how the game unfolds and stuff. I like their football team. You don't get to this kind of game if you're lousy. They're not going to be 2‑11 teams, 1‑11 teams playing in this game. You're always going to play a good team in these games. We're going four years in a row. I don't want to get off on a tangent, four years in a row, and I think we played prior, Newton, Russell, Wilson, now Collin Klein. Some of those are very good. It's a good football team. Well‑coached team. Good coach. Good scheme. Ducks got to come ready to play. Q. All teams have injuries throughout a season. You got hit hard this year. Does a month between games give your guys enough time to get back? COACH ALIOTTI: Yes. Guys that were dinged up a little bit. If you have a major injury, you lose Boyett for a year, Avery Patterson where it's a major surgery, those guys around coming back. Guys that have little owies, things with their shoulders, sprains in their ankles and stuff, certainly with a month to 35 days, they can ease into this thing. We'll have everybody that we had against Oregon State. We should be fine that way. We should be fine that way. Q. You have rotated a ton of guys on defense all year. How much more does that help against a quarterback like Klein? COACH ALIOTTI: Well, it will keep us fresh. I don't know schematically if that does anything. But keep us fresh. We're going to continue to do that. We'll play our normal six to seven defensive linemen, four to five outside guys, four to five inside guys. We're a little bit lighter in the secondary than we used to be because of some of our key injuries. I'm a little bit more guarded there, you know. As Dan Hawkins once said, it's not an intramural program. Kidding, Dan. But anyway, it's a little bit tougher to substitute guys back there because you make a mistake, you lose a gap, they make a 10‑ or 12‑yard run. You lose something back there deep, it's explosion plays. It's key not to give up explosion plays. Q. How much does it help being back here with some of the older guys who have done this trip before? Help the younger guys out much? COACH ALIOTTI: I think experience is as key in anything you do. Just like in any job, any situation, the more you've been in it, the more times you've gone through it, experience is very helpful. Four years ago, I would have said we had a good football team, and that's a credit to Chip Kelly. Four years later, we have a good football program. The way I'm answering that question is this: our guys, I knock on wood every day, but our guys get it. You never have Utopia. I think our guys know what is at stake. Doesn't mean we're going to win the game, but I think their focus is awesome, their attention to detail is awesome, and I'd like to believe, from what I've seen, that we're bright eyed in the morning, getting some good rest, not out screwing around at night. Chip has developed a culture here where the character of our football player is of high character. Like I said, nobody's perfect. I'm looking out at people that aren't perfect. If I look at myself, I'm not perfect either. But for the most part our guys get it, okay? Q. Is it easier to coach now than it was four years ago? COACH ALIOTTI: I'm a dinosaur. With these timeouts that the kids have when they're younger, the way they're brought up at times, I still am from the school of hard knocks, that you work hard, you do it hard, you bust. Sometimes kids are coddled a little bit more than I'm used to way back then. You can treat them more at ditch frogs than you could back then. I say that kiddingly. It does help us because our kids are good kids and you don't have to worry about a lot of that off‑the‑field stuff. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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