Syracuse Orange College Football Pregame Quote, 10/21/2019

We’re looking banged up a little bit. I don’t know exactly where some of the guys are as far as an injury report. We are going to be meeting with a lot of those guys later on tonight with the doctors because the doctors have to work their full days at the hospitals and in the afternoon they’ll get here. Sometime tonight we’ll know where some of those guys that are banged up are at. Florida State is a very explosive football team. Cam Akers is one of the top backs in the ACC, and rightfully so. The guy, literally, breaks a lot of tackles by himself and it’s really hard for one guy to bring him down. [James Blackmon] is doing a nice job with their offense. [Tamorrion Terry] the receiver is really good. Their defense is extremely large. Big, big people on the inside, difficult to move in the run game. Their corners are very talented, and their safeties are big hitters. Their defense is full of four- and five-star guys who have played a lot of football against us, or they’re guys who have played a lot of football at Florida State and have waited their turn to become a starter. Big task going down there. I’m not sure if we have ever won down there. I’m guessing how things have been going, the answer is probably no, but you analytic guys can probably tell me, but we’re going to go down there with some hungry guys and see if we can come out with our first ACC win.

On how he’d evaluate the coaching of the offensive line:

I’m not going to evaluate the coaching in a public spectrum. Any time we talk about that stuff, that’s private stuff. Those guys are working hard, there’s two ways you have to make sure you have growth. The coaches have to be doing the things that give the kids an opportunity and the kids have to receive it. And, I’m not happy with the growth, but there is a lot of reasons for that.

On whether he can expand on his previous answer, and if he can follow up with what he said after the Pitt game that everyone’s jobs are on the line:

Absolutely, it’s been moved around. Some of those sacks are on kids just not targeting correctly. You have to have more than one protection. If you have protection ‚ÄúA‚Äù and protection ‚ÄúB‚Äù and you have a kid doing protection ‚ÄúA‚Äù when they’re supposed to be doing ‚ÄúB,‚Äù it means guys are running in and no one’s blocking them. And you’ve got opportunities with wide receivers not doing what they’re supposed to be doing and the quarterback not doing what he’s supposed to do. [The blame] is all spread out, so to put it on one position is something you’ve got to be careful of especially when you go back and watch the tape. The thing we need to do is grow, and we are not growing fast enough for me and we need to put an emphasis on that.

On how he said after the Pitt game that there would be new faces on the field and if that’s still true:

We are going to do some things differently in practice. More people are going to get more opportunities and what they do with those opportunities in practice will let us know whether they get an opportunity in the game. At certain positions it is important for the continuity of things to be working with a certain group of guys next to you all the time because that is the best way to do it. Now, I think we are at the point where we are willing to break that continuity to make sure we have the right people in the right spot.

On what he liked from redshirt senior quarterback Clayton Welch:

He didn’t have a complete game. There’s obviously things he can do better, but I thought from him getting in there for his first full body of big work, I thought he did a nice job. Had had the second longest pass play in the history of Syracuse football which is kind of interesting. He did good things and he did bad things. The things you have to remember is anytime you get a backup quarterback in a game like that, and then he’s going to play his next game, they don’t have any tape on him in the first game. Then they have tape on him in the second game. And the more tape, the more you play, people have a book on you and you can’t stay the same. If you stay the same, they are going to run you down, you have to continue to get better and hopefully he will.

On whether he feels that the effort has been there in these losses:

I do. I don’t think guys have ‚Äúquit.‚Äù That line that people try to say all the time. We’ve been in all of the games. I don’t think there is a game in the ACC that we’ve been out of. I’m proud of that part and being close is something that some people think is really cool, but we are not in it to be close. Everybody here wants to get a win as much as the next guy and we are going to do what we’ve always done or we will change and do some things we’ve never done to try and get that first win.‚Äú

On the challenges of recruiting offensive and defensive line talent, especially in the northeast:

I really believe that when it comes to the northeast that is one of the positions you can get good players at. Now, I do think there are a lot of schools in the northeast that are battling for the same guys, but, traditionally over the history of this game, some of the better offensive big guys and better defensive big guys have come from the northeast. I don’t think that’s one of the downfalls of this area. It’s a position that has a lot of opinions and you are judging big guys playing against little guys. When you are a six foot five guy in high school at 260 pounds, you may play against one guy who is as big as you, so they’re always pushing around smaller people. They really don’t get to see guys their size until they step on a college or university where everyone looks like them and then you really find out where they are at going against people their own size. I think that’s where some people might have misses, but there’s things you can try to do to eliminate those misses and make sure you are right more than wrong and that they’re good more than bad. What I feel like is we have a bunch of young guys that are playing a bunch of older guys and they need to continue to develop. The same people that you are talking about now, could be one of the best O-lines in the ACC because of how much they’ve played together and that’s where I thought the expectations were unfair from 2018 to 2019. That offensive line in 2018 was legit. You had guys that had played a lot of college football and they were grown cats. They could walk down the street by themselves and people didn’t bother them. You just got to wait for some of these guys to grow up. They are 18 and 19 and not 21 and 22.

On how redshirt sophomore Tommy DeVito is listed as the No. 1 QB on the depth chart and whether it can be assumed that he’ll play:

I wouldn’t assume anything with the medical stuff that has come out this year. But, if he’s able to go we are going to play him, he’s our best guy. And if he’s not we will play someone else. The one thing I don’t ever want to do is put anyone out there who is hurt. I’m not going to do that. If they’re good, they’re good, and if they’re good and hurt we’ll play somebody else.

On if his outlook on redshirting senior defensive lineman McKinley Williams has changed:

Again, I’m not going to talk about that because that’s house stuff. We are going to keep evaluating. It is a good question to keep asking, but right now I am not going to talk about it. He has not practiced with us yet.

On do Florida State’s struggles on the field show that recruiting is just luck:

Recruiting has always been that way. The hardest thing about any recruit is what kind of heart do they have inside and how much they really love what they are doing. Somebody can be great at your job [specifically, reporting], but when it gets hard and when it gets tough, when there’s a hurricane outside and someone’s got to go outside and do the news, how much do they really want to do it? And I think that is the biggest thing about recruiting, and if we had something to judge that we’d probably be making a lot of money doing a lot of other stuff. Recruiting is interesting, I enjoy it. The longer you are in and the longer you get to meet people they give a certain aura and when you get the green lights you go and if you get the red or the yellow you have to do more homework. You’re not going to be right all of the time, you just have to be right most of the time.

On what excited him in the Pitt game and how does he get the players to keep playing well in the second half of the season:

The first thing is to get them to start listening and staying in house. I just think that some expectations were unrealistic. With some of those guys I really enjoyed watching them out there. With Clayton, that was a free safety blitz. The first play they didn’t blitz him. The second play on the five-yard line they blitzed him. Who would take their backup quarterback on the five yard line and tell him to throw a deep ball, that guy’s gotta be crazy? And he catches it, there goes the free safety coming down, he sees him coming, he gives himself a couple steps to give himself time and changes the elevation on the deep ball‚Äìhe didn’t throw it flat like a rock skipping across a lake. He gave his receiver time to find it. Now the receiver has to understand when he [the receiver] did that little extra two-step move, it was going to be up there and he looks up and finds it. There was a lot of rule number three, I’m not going to tell you what that is, but you can find out from one of my players, but it was a lot of rule number three on that. I was really excited to see him do that, now he did not do everything right, but that one play was really cool to see. To see Chris Elmore get his first tackle for loss while playing both ways on both sides of the ball was good stuff. And Josh Black played a nice game, he’s been around a lot. A lot of people do not realize the game he plays inside, but Josh Black is playing a high level of football for us. So, there’s a lot of good. Abdul Adams had a cut block that was classic, I mean absolutely A+ on it and he’s done that before. But to see him execute it absolutely the way it was demonstrated in camp in August. To have that show up in a game, those are the type of things we are looking for. There was positives, there was negatives. When we talked about it on Sunday in here we showed them all the stuff, we show them the good and the bad and how close they are to winning. And I do not think we are going to fall apart, I think we just need that first break and we don’t know where it’s going to happen, but we have the faith it is going to happen.

On how he’s going to have more players have big play:

As coaches we need to put our best players in position to help us win. Whether that is offensively, defensively or on special teams. And then when you put them in that situation, you have to hope and have faith they are going to execute. The first play of the game, we watched that, watched that, watched that, I don’t know how late at night, but we’re saying we’re going to have a chance to score a touchdown on the first play of the game. Now, we did not tell the players that because we don’t want them to have all that energy on one play. But, that play happened exactly how we thought it was going to happen. The throw was where we thought it had to be and I can say the young man dropped it, but that is not like him. That’s a ‚Äúhappening.‚Äù I mean, for him to drop a ball like that, I am not going to get mad at him because over the long haul his percentage is extremely good. So, it was unfortunate, but it is our job to go back and find those things. Evan Foster, with the opportunity to make that big interception, we didn’t know that was going to happen. That quarterback never saw him. He was in the exact same situation as Tommy DeVito against Clemson, he never saw him. He didn’t try to throw that ball through Evan, he literally didn’t see him standing there. And if Evan catches it, it can be a different game. I get excited because that stuff is fun and that stuff is football. That’s what makes our game so great that it is like that. And that good guys on people’s teams can get hurt and other guys have to step up and come in. And as a coach that is why you have to coach the entire room, because you never know when the next guy is going to be up. That energy, comradery, staying together and having faith without evidence is what makes football football. So, we’re excited about our opportunity, it might be David vs. Goliath situation, but last time I checked the history books I think it happened once you know maybe it might be able to happen again.