Louisville Cardinals College Football Pregame Quote, 11/11/2019

First of all, I want to start off by thanking veterans because today’s Veteran’s Day, and I thank them for what they’ve done for our country. Not only providing a safe place and a free place to be able to do what we want to do, so I want to give them a shout out for everything they’ve done and what they’ll continue to do for us, in particular for what we do and that’s coach football. It’s awesome, and we love it even when we have bad weekends like this past one we still love it. We have a great opportunity this week to come back and play. That’s the great thing about football is the fact that, win or lose, you get to come back and play again. The next game is the most important game, so we’re excited about the opportunity to go down to Raleigh and play NC State. We know what we’re going to get, and that’s a school that I’ve always visited a lot, and of course Coach Ledford coached there. We know a lot about them and how they run their program, and we have a lot of respect for Dave and what he’s done with this program for years. They’re a very well-coached team, kids always play hard. This year they’ve had a ton of injuries throughout their whole team, and they’ve had to play a lot of young players. They’ve played several quarterbacks and settled in on [Devin] Leary now, and that’s given them a chance offensively. [Zonovan] Knight’s a really good running back. They’re always a great crowd there in Raleigh and is one of the louder venues in the ACC. We’re looking forward to this opportunity to get better.

Do you have any update on Mekhi [Becton] or any of the guys who got hurt on Saturday?

Mekhi is getting better. He’s listed as day-to-day and we’ll see how he is this week. If he’s available to play, we want to play him. We’ll see where he’s at in the middle and at the end of the week. Rest of the guys, I can’t remember anything as far as everybody else. Tutu [Atwell] should be fine, he’ll be good to go. Dorian [Jones] will be out. He got an MRI but we have not gotten the results back from that yet, so he’ll be out this week and then we’ll see. We’re hoping for the best, but it doesn’t look good right now. Khane [Pass] got bruised up pretty good, but I think he’ll be ready to go. He’ll probably be back practicing in the middle of the week. He did get a few dings in that game. [Micale] Cunningham will be fine and he practiced on Sunday.

You said that NC State has used a couple of quarterbacks. What do you see with Leary, and why do you think they settled with him?

He’s got a good arm and he can throw the football. Coming out of high school, he was a high-ranked player. Looking at all three, he gives them the best chance to move the ball. He can throw it. If you give him time back there, he’ll be able to complete those balls. They have a few guys on the outside who are big receivers. KNIGHT gives them something in the running game since he’s very explosive. I think they feel that [Leary] gives them the best chance. He’s young, he’s inexperienced, but now he’s got a couple of games under his belt, and they think he can get better and better. Talent-wise, Leary gives them the best chance.

Looking at Micale’s injury before he slipped and got hit on the ground, it seemed like throughout the game the turf crew was spending a lot of time picking up chunks. Do you think the turf condition had anything to do with the injuries?

It’s hard to say. With Dorian, he said his gateway when he was running down on kickoff, hurt his leg. It’s hard to say as both teams were slipping and sliding around. Walking around in pregame, the turf had a lot of areas where there was just dirt, and then it started raining, which created mud, so there was a lot of slipping going on. But it was both teams, so it’s hard to say if that does create the injuries or not. I think a couple of our injuries were just guys getting lifted, not anything to do with the turf, so it’s hard to say.

When you look at film, did anything change in the offensive line’s performance after Mekhi went out?

I think [Adonis] Boone came in and did really good. He gave up one sack, but other than that he played really well. When you’re in that position, particularly left tackle, especially when he hasn’t played that much, but he got his feet wet and felt good about going in. Going back and watching the film, he held his own. I think it was a good D-line we played against, very athletic, they can run well. Other than that one sack, I thought he played really well and had a good game.

How do you shore up the punting after the Miami game? Talking about the punt that was blocked and the short punt:

Well Mason (King) needs to punt the ball better. We’ve got to get better at punts. We need to get more hang time. The punt return that they had. 3.1 seconds of hang time is not nearly enough. We had a couple of guys who were supposed to be flanking to the left that were flanking to the right. They’ve got to be in their lanes. The punt that was blocked, we have to get more onto that particular player. We didn’t hardly get anything on him. We had a guy there, we just didn’t get anything on him. We’ve got to be able to field punts. We didn’t field that punt and gave up short field. I thought we had momentum at that point in the game too. The defense did a great job and we gave the ball right back to them. No question the punt team and punt return team, that was a huge place in the game. Particularly when we’ve been giving up some touchdown passes. You have to play well in that phase of the game, with special teams, in order to give yourself a chance. I think looking back at it. The 14 penalties were the most penalties we had this year. We’ve been pretty solid in the penalty game. When you have 14 penalties for 121 yards, that’s twelve first downs. That’s a lot and we lost the turnover battle. We had three turnovers to zero and you don’t win that, that’s going be hard to win. 14 penalties, some of those late. Those are the difference in the game.

Talking about he talks to the guys about how to not let one bad game in a phase of the game carry over to the next week:

Yeah well it is one game. Like I told them Sunday, whether you did play well or if you didn’t play well it doesn’t matter. You have to come back this week and give it everything you have in your preparation. There were a lot of hard meetings yesterday. We had position meetings with different groups and there were some bright spots that we were able to make some plays out there. I think we had close to 500 yards offensively. One thing that we had been doing offensively was finishing in the red zone. We had three opportunities that we didn’t score any points. Two interceptions and then right there at the end we didn’t catch the touchdown pass there. There were some positives there. We have to take some positives out of it. But you have to continue to get better. We want to continue to improve. There are a lot of things we can get better at and if we don’t and you let that linger. That loss will end up with another one. So you have to put that one aside. Continue to move forward and work on N.C. State.

What do you think caused the amount of penalties last game?

Early on, I think we had three false starts up front. I think it was confusion with the cadence. Hearing things, it was loud in there early in the game. With that roof they have in the stadium, it made it loud. So that was hitting our offensive line a couple of times. Robbie (Bell) gets called for pulling a Miami guy off the pile, that’s a 15 yard penalty. Stuff like that, we get a chop block on a kickoff return. Which we all know you can’t block below the waste. Baffling that you end up doing that. It was just a lot of uncharacteristic type things with penalties that we had not been having throughout the season. That will put you behind. Particularly offensively, maybe we had eight on offense. Eight penalties on offense. So it’s hard enough when you get those lost yards from penalties, it’s hard to gain momentum. Early in the game, that was huge. We’ve got to eliminate those. I think there was one holding penalty, a chop penalty, high low, back to back facemasks. Obviously grabbing too high. Those are things that we haven’t been doing that you can’t do. If you’re going to win games you can’t do those things.

How did your team come back after yesterday?

As far as the organization is the same, but obviously you have some different conversations after a game like that. It is all of us in the building. The strength staff in the weight room to the training room, to all of our meeting rooms. So, things are said differently. We are going to try to get better and we are going to look at what we did bad and correct it. Sometimes when you come in on Sunday, players are going to have to have thick skin. The got to be able to take coaching and know that what we are trying to do is make them a better team and better individual players. The structure is going to be the same, but when you come back obviously the corrections, the mental part is going to be a little bit different.

The players have been really reserved with you all season, any reason why that would change?

I don’t think so. I think the guys will come back. Listen, Sunday’s practice we talked about the system we chart the extrusion. How much they put out in practice. It was one of the better Sundays putting our wise. So hopefully it lit a fire under them and to know that they are going to come out and give everything they have. I think that’s what you have to ask from these guys. To be resilient, you have to be able to come back. When you face adversity, how do you come back from it is what is going to be measured and so that’s what we are looking at and we have to come back strong.‚Äù

What are the calling cards of NC State?

Well they always play good defense. I think obviously he is a defensive minded coach and they’re structurally sound on defense. The kids play hard on that side of the ball. You know you’re going to get that they want to be a physical football team. They want to be that blue collar tough minded football team. I think that’s, that’s what they want to be. Again, you’re playing so many young guys with so many injuries they put themselves in the last couple of weeks in bad spots with turnovers you know, against Clemson they’re backed up as a lot of short fields early night game next thing you know it’s out of control you know, so that those things can happen obviously. I think we know we’re going to get from those guys you know, you’re going to get a hard blue collar team is going to play hard and coach Well, you know what, we got to go into game of specter, they’re going to play their best game. That’s how you have to go into it if you’re playing against those guys.

On G.G. Robinson’s comments:

Well, I you know, I don’t know I think they when everybody has that mindset that you’re going to think you’re going to perform better. I think that’s anybody. If you have that underdog mindset that you got to go out and try to perform, improve something every single time you step on a court or field, anywhere that you perform better. Absolutely. Now yeah, if you’re, no matter who you are, you can look at all the champions out there, that if you think you’ve arrived, that’s when you’re going to get and I think you know, for us this team, we certainly have not arrived. I mean, we know we’ve got a lot of work to do a lot of deficiencies that need to get better. So you know, but I think you know coming off of that stretch we had there in October, people pat you on the back because I didn’t think you’d be this good or, you know, win this many games and, and, and hopefully, you know, guys didn’t buy into that maybe. We’ve lost too many games about any of that mess. So we got to continue to get better and a long ways to go.

How Hawkins continues to get better at running the football:

Yeah, I think what we want to do we want to run the football. We all know that and that’s a mindset that we have offensively. Hawkins runs hard. We continue to get him the ball and he makes plays for us. So then Hassan Hall comes in and had another kind of nice touchdown run on for that fourth down, right. So we feel like really both of those backs can give us a lot in the running game. And Hawkins again, he’s not a big guy, but he runs like he’s a big guy, but he’s also when he takes it pass the line of scrimmage, he can take a big runs after that. So, so yeah, we’re excited about that too. Tutu Atwell had another big game. He’s having an All-Conference type season so far, big play a guy for us offensively and seems like every week, you know, he’s taken up taking one to the house. So, I mean, we have some guys that we think that can, you know, can change the game with offensively and we got to continue to give him the ball.

When Tutu Atwell was out towards the end, Keion Wakefield made some plays. We haven’t seen a ton from him, is he a guy down the road that you can rely on?

We hope so. He has practiced well. He’s played quite a bit but just hasn’t really been targeted, as much. Tutu goes out, he (Keion Wakefield) goes in and makes some plays for us, makes the most of his opportunity. Makes some big plays for us. He isn’t as fast as Tutu but can make some plays for us, hopefully move the chains, and he will continue to get better and better and in a game like that he got the chance to show what he can do and hopefully gave him some confidence.

When you looked at the film defensively, what stood out to you about Saturday, and what went bad?

The fact that we didn’t get as much pressure as we would like. Part of that is they were getting rid of the football quickly. The things we must do a lot better is closing on the receivers and making the quarterback hold the ball a lot longer. There were times when we got hits on the quarterback, but the ball is going. Miami had been a team that had given up a lot of sacks and we sacked them one time. If you’re in those throwing lanes where they must hold it just a half second more then we get the chance to get too them. That’s the difference in the game right there. We must do a much better job of closing coverages, to many times we had guys running free, and that’s been an issue this whole season quite frankly.

Are those physical issues or mental issues?

I think it is both. We have had some mental busts with not proper alignment pre0-snap. If you’re supposed to be inside shade as a corner and I’m outside, you just open it up for the bend or the post. Some of it is ability, where everyone we are playing has a guy that can run. So, if your out of position just a little bit then you don’t have the ability to catch up. Some of it is that some of its other things. We’re going to continue to work on that in practice. Obviously were not where we would like yet, but we will continue to work.

Clemson has clinched the division title now, the fifth year in a row, how big is that gap between them and everyone else and how long will it take for teams to close it?

Seems like its pretty big. At least 35 points a game bigger. It seems like every time you turn the scores on Saturday night, they won by 30 or 40 points and their starters aren’t even playing in the fourth quarter. It is incredible, what they have been able to accomplish there. They have so many great players, they are coached well, they are top four in the country in offense and defense maybe top three? Offense I think there maybe top two and defense maybe number three. When you have the top offense and defense in the country, your going to be hard to beat. I think in this league, everyone else is very competitive. You look for the number two and there isn’t a clear number two, there obviously is not right now. It just shows you how much better Clemson is than everybody else. People want to write and say how the ACC isn’t that good, but I think there are a lot of good teams in the ACC. Clemson is just at another level. They are at the level with the LSU’s the Alabama’s that played this weekend. When you can go a whole season and not have to play your starters the full time, that’s impressive what they have been able to accomplish‚Äù.

Now that you are down to these last three games, are there some other names that you hope to get involved, especially now that the season winds down?

I mean Adonis Boone is a guy that comes to mind with Mekhi (Becton) going out. He has played a little bit throughout the season. Know he is a guy you must lean on a lot more. He isn’t a skill guy that everybody sees, but he is a guy that is in the trenches there. So those offensive line guys, there is going to be some things were going to have to do upfront. But, once you get to this point in the season, you are playing the guys that you feel like you need and want to be playing. Dorian Jones is a guy that we wanted to play these last four games, but in his first play, he gets hurt. Which is a shame. I hate it for him. I feel bad because he was going to get so much valuable experience this last month here. We will see how it goes and if anyone else wants to rise up, but pretty much the guys that are playing are going to be the ones that we will be playing at this point.

I don’t know how much football you got to watch after you game Saturday, but Appalachian St. beat South Carolina. What are your thoughts on theme beating both South and North Carolina this year?

We were the third youngest team in the country last year, so all those guys are back. I felt like they were going to be good this year. It is still hard to go into North Carolina and win and South Carolina and win, thing got to go your way too. I saw they had a pick six, and I mean they only had 200 yards of offense and they still won. You still must just find a way to win. I’m just proud of those guys, its been a big year for them and all those guys that we coached are now making big plays. It’s not surprising. They have a great opportunity to pry win that conference and potentially go to a New Year’s six bowl. There’s still a lot of ball to be played left.