Gophers turn their focus to Michigan and the Little Brown Jug
• Looking forward to getting back on the practice field today and getting our kids on track and get better. You have to have short term memory, we’ve taken care of everything we needed to on Sunday.
• You have to go through all 4 games, the game of football is different every week. You’re working with kids, we all, I know Coach Hoke very well and he knows me very well. Football is about execution, when you execute well, good things happen. They’ve had a week off, and I’m sure they’ve worked on execution. Michigan is a very good football team, them and OSU have as good of athletes as anyone in the country.
• I don’t think on Sunday we just talked offense, we talked the whole game. We watched the whole game, it’s never as bad as you think it is, and it’s never as good as you want it to be. We got beat fundamentally, the placement of feet, hands, tackling, etc…it has nothing to do with schemes, it was fundamentals.
• We can’t control what happened against Iowa, we need to move forward.
• As you build a program, you need to have one of those defining moments, if we were able to win the jug, that would be a defining moment. That’s where our program is. As a program, we want to keep moving forward, we took a step back on Saturday, but now we need to take 2 steps forward.
• It was good to get Donnell back in there and get him sweating a little bit.
• Brock Vereen and Derrick Wells are both ready to go. They both practices Sunday. Derrick has a sore shoulder, needs to build strength back. We don’t have a lot of depth in some areas. There are some things we can do to be careful with injuries, but as long as he’s cleared to play, we’ll continue to be smart.
• Is he frustrated with having to focus on fundamentals 4 weeks in? No, I spent my life on fundamentals. We’re coaching young players right now, young players have to continue to work on that. I need to do a better job frankly, I need to do a better job. We need to get the kids coached job.
• Everywhere I’ve been, we’ve pulled out a game that were weren’t suppose to pull out. What we’re disappointed about, is our kids had a great Friday night, a great pre-game, they were ready to play. I think they were so excited about playing in front of a big crowd, that we played out of control. We played so darn hard that it was out of control. We’re not taking anything away from Iowa, but we’re better than we played.
• It was an ugly game for us, certainly from an offensive standpoint. But as ugly as it was, Marcus Jones got us some momentum. If and butts were candy and nuts, we’d all have a Merry Christmas.
• You concentrate on what you know happened, you take that and you go fix it. Our kids have enough pride in what they’re doing and they want to do well. There’s no guarantees. When you lose a game, if we fundamentally used our hands and executed and did all those things and you get beat – I can walk in here and say we did everything we could. When you don’t that bothers you as a coach.
• I thought our receivers played well, by the way, and we did good job at the kicking game.
• It takes a while at the QB position, nobody likes to be patient. Phillip and Mitch are going to learn a lot.
• We didn’t play very good at linebacker, we need to get better at that. You’ve got discipline and repetition.
• We missed Mike Henry a lot, a lot. He’s going to be riding a bike today. Until someone’s gone, you never know ho much you miss them. It hurt us, it hurt our execution.