Q: Opening Statement

Ken OKeefe: Right now, we are in the midst of getting ready for Georgia Tech. Our guys are just coming out of exams, most of our work to this point has been fundamental against our own defense. Sunday we will start to work towards Georgia Tech a little bit. With that said, fire away.

Q: Do they compare to any Big Ten team defensively?

OKeefe: No. Not really. They are an eight man front team, they want to be that, and they are like everyone else, you have to stop the run in order to be successful. Their base is a 4-3, but they have played a 3-4 against Clemson in their last ball game. They might have been a bit banged up in the line and felt that was the way to go, and they have played a lot of nickel. That is very much like a regular 4-3 except they substitied another defensive back for one of their linebackers and they are not afraid to play against the run with their nickel look. They are very athletic, they have speed and they are strong up front. Morgan, #91 is really a force to deal with. You have to know where he is and what he is up to. They will play him on either edge and sometimes they will stand him up inside. They can do a variety of things with him. They have a lot of speed in the secondary and at linebacker.

Q: Their secondary has been a problem for them, hasn’t it?

OKeefe: In what regard?

Q: Giving up a lot of yards.

OKeefe: There have been some big plays, no doubt about that. It hasn’t all come at the expense of the secondary. I am sure that’s something they are aware of. The only problem with that is that after each big play that you see them give up, normally when you go back to the next series that the offense has the ball, there are seven more points on the board and about six or eight minutes taken off the clock. It might not be the problem that some might think it is.

Q: Is Morgan a guy you have to double team?

OKeefe: You can’t afford to double team a guy because that leaves someone else open. You can get some help over there with him, but it will come down to having to block because you can’t just run away from him. We are going to have to block him and that will be a challenge for our guys up front, in the pass and run.

Q: How good will it feel to have everyone healthy on your side of the ball?

OKeefe: It will feel good to be able to go out there with everyone you’d want to have. It has been a while since we have thought about that and I am thankful we didn’t have to play the week after the Minnesota game like other people in the country because that might have been tough on us.

Q: How would you describe Rick’s progression?

OKeefe: Great. He is full speed ahead. He has been that way for a while, he practiced last night and he has done all of the drills and every team segment that we have had the last three practices. Up to that, he was doing certain segments. He started out with just drill work, and then seven on sevens and that progressed pretty fast. Yesterday he took off and ran a few times out of the pocket. It was good to see him doing that with the ankle.

Q: Has it been a fun year for you? You have had to patch things together and for the most part you have found the answers to injuries. Did you have something like 20 starters this year?

OKeefe: It would depend on what your definition of fun is. This group of guys has been a lot of fun to coach and a lot of fun to be around. They are a great group of guys that work hard, being successful is important to them. They have good chemistry, each guy is important to everyone else. It’s a unique group. We have had some really good leadership with it. That by itself makes it a lot of fun for us to coach. I think it makes it a lot of fun for them to be around each other, whether it’s on the field or in the locker room. In the game of football, you almost become numb to some of the stuff that goes on around you. If a guy gets hurt, you keep going. Especially here, we have been used to that. When maybe the first few times it happened years ago, you might have stopped to think about it. Now you don’t think about it and all of the sudden at the end of the game, you are like ‘wow, that happened’. It has happened all across the team, too. OUr guys are very resilient, they believe in themselves and they believe in the next man in theory. They approach that with great seriousness and the guy that steps in is expected to fill the spot and fill it well and not let the team down and that is what we have seen for the most part. That makes it fun to be around these guys as well.

Q: Talk about Marvin McNutt’s growth.

OKeefe: We were not sure…the first expectation was for him to get in shape like a receiver, which is harder to do than you might think. He has done well. The biggest surprise out of Marvin is, for a guy that if we are all in a staff room in the beginning of August and we were going to try to figure out who was going to make the most big plays on the team, Marvin might not have gotten a vote. Here he is making all of these big plays with his feet. He is a big guy, he has some natural strength, he catches the ball well and he is hard to tackle. He has become hard to chase down it looks like to me. He has made some very big plays with his feet, starting in the Arkansas State game and then against Indiana, that was a huge play for us that he made for us there and he continued to do that all the way through the rest of the year. Coach Campbell has done a great job of working his technique, teaching him the ins and outs of running routes, releases, the fundamentals of being a wide receiver. Marvin, having played quarterback, understands that from a different viewpoint and sees it a little bit better and that has been a big help. When Vandenberg had to go in if we were having trouble in the huddle, Marvin could straighten it out a bit because he knew some of the stuff. He knows signals and everything, so that helped us.

Q: You have had six weeks off, how does an offense get that timing back? You had a lot of injuries, but it has an affect?

OKeefe: One of the things that will be critical will be our intensity level. We had some early workouts where there was a lot of intensity and we had a lot of good competition. One of the things we have been trying to do, especially with some of the skill guys, is to force them to compete and practice more together. We have done more one on one stuff not only in pass protections or run blocking, but we have put some drills together where certain portions of the offense is competing against…tight ends and running backs are going against linebackers in passes. We have one on ones with DB’s and WR’s, but we are working different things there. We have forced our guys into more competitive situations the last few weeks for two reasons. Number one in my mind, you want to prevent boredom from setting in with the game being that far off. Number two, the thing that will be most critical is to have the intensity that you want to have on gameday because if you have that, you have a chance to have rhythm and a chance to execute better and for us that means we need to be physical also.

Q: What did you learn from the Orange Bowl seven years ago. Coach Ferentz has said it was like six weeks off and a lot of guys going to award shows, etc.

OKeefe: We didn’t have as many guys traveling around the country this year, like we did then. That may not have affected us that much any way. Guys still have to take exams on every campus. Everyone has distractions they have to deal with. Sometimes we use that as an excuse. Two teams will have to play each other, there are varying degrees of time off, but no one is playing the next week after their last ball game. I don’t think they have that much of an advantage like everyone thinks. Some folks in our league played two games after the regular season after our regular season ended, in hopes that that would help them. A lot of times it’s stuff that coaches get worried about because they don’t have anything else to do but sit around and worry about stuff. Especially when you are flying around recruiting. You start thinking about a lot of things.

Q: Will they blitz a lot?

OKeefe: They brought pressure 25% of the time, and they will crank it up to 40-75% in the redzone depending on the down and distance. You never know what you are getting until the game starts and how people will change things up. They have had time to game plan. Anytime you have more than one week to gameplan, you run the risk of confusing yourself, at least that is how it is for us sometimes. You get to do too much stuff. If you have three weeks, who knows what can happen. They didn’t win 11 games by accident. They will show up and be who they are and we will play football and you have to do what you are supposed to do. One of my old high school coaches, I was talking to him on the phone the other day and he was at a luncheon and they asked him if he uses wristbands. He said they don’t, but last year they didn’t have a great year and this year they won state. Last year he said he thought about going to them and he was going to put block and tackle on there, and that was it. That is what it will come down to.

Q: Was Adam a revelation at running back, coming into the season who knows what he thought was possible for him.

OKeefe: Everything was unknown at that point in time. As far as when we came into camp, once Jewel was out, we had Paki, and Brinson was out then. We thought it might be Jewel, Brinson, Paki, Robinson and Wegher. The order got flipped a little bit. How would we know anything? Wegher wasn’t here, Robinson got limited reps in the spring. Until you put the ball in their hands against someone else, it’s hard to tell. I will say this; I think Lester Erb has done an unreal job the last two years. He took Shonn Greene off the furniture truck and got him ready to play last year and Hampton was a true freshman last year. You look at this year, two guys that were relative unknowns at this level, with no experience, he has done an outstanding job. Especially in the pass game. Running backs are pretty instinctive. Usually, you say run right, run left, and they can get that part straight. They can run routes. But now you have to put them in situations where they have to protect the quarterback. You have to be able to trust what they are going to do, or do they know what they are going to do. The doing it is the toughest part. Usually for a first year running back, are they physically able to do it and then understanding the assignment. Both of those guys did an outstanding job, especially early on in the year. There were critical plays in each of the first five or six games where they picked up blitzes and we made big plays in the pass game where you would not say they were freshmen playing for the first time. Lester has done an unbelievable job of keeping those guys moving. He doesn’t even blink. Lester doesn’t blink about any of that stuff. But he is a great teacher

Q: When would Dace have to get back to work to have a realistic shot?

OKeefe: We had something similar with Pete McMahon when we played in the Capital One Bowl. We didn’t get him back until a week before the game and we started him. And he played great. Who knows.

Q: Is it easier with veterans?

OKeefe: Yes, you have to know what you are doing. We are not going to do that with some guy that has only played two games. It wouldn’t be happening. Dace is doing well. He looks good and he is ready to go, but we are waiting on the word.

Q: When you talked in August about Rick about what he had to improve on, did he take steps this year and elevate in your mind?

OKeefe: That is a good question. I haven’t stopped to think about it or evaluate that from a total performance perspective at this stage. I will say this; from a leadership standpoint, absolutely. From a performance standpoint, sort of. As many big plays as we made that was the difference in a game, we took the bare minimum in each game. But we made them. That defense is unreal. It was disappointing that we didn’t take care of the ball as well as we should have. Rick would be the first to tell you that. We are back working at that right now. Being a quarterback is a tough job. He has me telling him to take care of the ball, and the next time I am telling him to get the ball out of his hands. Those two things kind of don’t go together the right way. We have thrown the ball down the field more this year, too. We need to do a better job of that. Those are the same things we are talking about right now. Make good decisions but don’t be afraid to throw it downfield, or to throw it away and let Donahue go to work.

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