Transcript From Ohio State Postgame Press Conference – Ohio State Buckeyes
9/1/2007 12:00:00 AM | Football
COACH TRESSEL: I thought we came out and played against a good football team. We knew Youngstown State would come in and they’d be a physical football team playing as hard as they could possibly play. They certainly didn’t let us down from that standpoint. I thought we did some good things. Probably the thing that is most positive is that we now will have opportunities to study real game footage and a lot of guys that haven’t been in the game before are going to have a chance to really learn a great deal. We’ll find out a lot more about ourselves. It’s a huge opportunity to take another step next week and we’ve got to improve in many, many ways. I thought the kids played hard and we’ve got a chance to keep progressing and become a good team.
REPORTER: Do you know how long Lawrence will be out?
COACH TRESSEL: I’ve heard six to eight weeks, but I don’t know if there’s any validity to that. I really haven’t talked to any doctors. It was kind of a locker room rumor I heard.
REPORTER: Is that like a nonweight-bearing bone injury or what did they tell you?
COACH TRESSEL: I didn’t talk to the doctors. I just kind of heard a rumor in the locker room that it might be a fracture of sorts, where, I don’t know, and that it could be six to eight weeks.
REPORTER: Jim, being a former high school coach, the only thing I knew going into our first game is we weren’t going to pass. That was back in the ’70’s.
COACH TRESSEL: You weren’t going to pass?
REPORTER: Yeah, but for you coming into this game, just your mindset as you started, was this the type of game you thought it would be in terms of what your team produces? After the game when you think back as to what you thought going in, how was it as what you thought it was going to be and what it was?
COACH TRESSEL: We went into the game wanting to work on the pass. We had new quarterbacks, and in my mind you can’t ask your quarterbacks to work on their throwing only when it’s third and 10 or only when you’re behind and trying to catch up and the world is a little different. So our game plan, Jim Bollman decided going into the ball game that he was going to throw a significant amount on all downs and make sure that our quarterbacks got a chance to have those experiences.
REPORTER: With all the story lines leading up to this game, are you glad this game is over now?
COACH TRESSEL: Absolutely. It’s tough when you play against your old folks, and Jon Heacock is like a brother because he was with us for so long and meant so much to us. And I’m also happy that we now have some opportunity to study ourselves and we’ve been practicing for so long against one another and all that stuff, and now we’ve played someone and we have a more valid measuring stick.
REPORTER: You talked about the contribution of those few freshmen, were you surprised by what Dane Sanzenbacher and Washington did today?
COACH TRESSEL: They were real solid. When you get an opportunity, you take advantage of it. Dukes has been banged up. Devon Lyons has been banged up. All those guys got some reps. They’re good players. Dane and Devon Torrence, I think, are going to be excellent players. They’ve had a chance to get in there and learn the system and it will be fun to watch them on film just to see exactly how well they did.
REPORTER: Jim, can you assess the play of Todd Boeckman and your rushing offense?
COACH TRESSEL: I thought Todd did a lot of good things. I know there’s going to be some things that we need to get much better at. He seemed to have excellent command. I think his completion percentage was solid and he had his head up when things weren’t perfect, which I think is crucial for a quarterback, so often you go all the way through practice and everything is one way, and then you get into the game and they’re playing different coverages, they’re doing different things, the world looks different. If you keep your eyes up and you study it, you’ve got a chance to make something happen. I thought he did that fairly well. I think his performance was solid. I’m not ready to say it was a winning performance. It’s hard to get those around here as a quarterback. But as far as the rushing game, there were some things I thought we did okay. They came out with a little bit different goal line defense than we had practiced against, different than what they had done in the past and different from what our team does. So there was a little adjustment there in that first set down there. Again, I think we’ll have a chance to study it, but I think it was okay.
REPORTER: You said the quarterback situation, everybody was going to play heading in. Based on their rotation, was that scripted or was that kind of the way the game progressed?
COACH TRESSEL: We planned on getting Robbie in early, then the way the game progressed, some of those drives took so long, the game was so short, that we thought, well, we better get Antonio in there before there’s two minutes left in the game because we wanted to get him some real life opportunities. So we kind of flip-flopped his series with Rob in the fourth quarter, and fortunately Rob could get back in and throw around a couple times more and our whole goal with the whole picture, quarterbacks and all, was to get repetitions, see if we can get better.
REPORTER: Prior to the injury, Lawrence Wilson was pretty active on the field. Obviously you’re waiting to hear. How big of a loss, though, if he’s out for eight weeks or maybe even the season?
COACH TRESSEL: Oh, that would be a terrific loss. Lawrence Wilson is a good player and he’s an enthusiastic guy. He gets riled up and fired up and he’s one of those guys that’s played enough to be a leader. He’s not wondering where he lines up. He knows where he lines up and can do some of those extras, so that would be a significant loss. You could ask these guys things. Anything.
REPORTER: Jim, could you just talk about Robiskie’s play today?
COACH TRESSEL: Yeah. Jim, is that you? You know, I thought, going into the year that Brian was going to need to be a solid guy for us. He was a solid guy for us last year in a different role. He wasn’t in there as many snaps as Gonzo and Teddy, but the snaps he was in, he took advantage of. We knew he was going to play more this year. I thought he came up with opportunities. I don’t know if we scripted that Roby (Robiskie) was going to catch this many, but Brian Robiskie is a good receiver.
REPORTER: Coach, we didn’t see Beanie get stopped for no gain or even a loss much last year, were some of those struggles due to the defense he gave you in the YSU game or do you think he was doing something different or —
COACH TRESSEL: I’m not sure. There was penetration. I know Coach Bruce used to say when we had Keith Byars, if you don’t get their feet to the line of scrimmage, I don’t care how good your back is. All we wanted to do was keep Keith Byars’ feet to the line of scrimmage and he was going to always gain. I’ll be interested to see if there wasn’t penetration and we didn’t get our feet to the line of scrimmage. But Beanie missed some time live-wise. At the end of spring, he missed last segment and he missed the jersey scrimmage. So this was important for him to get in. Our goal was to get him 20 carries. I don’t know how many we got him, but our goal was to get him 20, so we could get him back rolling in the direction we think he’s capable.
REPORTER: Kirk, how did you see that? It seemed like Brandon had a lot of firsts there.
BARTON: We know he’s a burner. He stepped in and gave us another dimension today. We in the offense were real happy about that. Between him and Beanie and Mo Wells, they’re a very capable back field. I’m not sure what happened with Beanie at the goal line, but we’ve got to get those things fixed in practice on Monday.
REPORTER: James, just talk a little bit about the defense. I know you guys rotated a lot of guys in at linebacker, how would you judge how you played out there today?
LAURINAITIS: I think that’s one of the good things about having a lot of depth at linebacker, you can work a lot of guys in and at the end of the day there’s not a dropoff, guys like Austin Spitler and Ross Homan, they’ve been really showing since spring that they’ve matured. They came out and proved it today. Thaddeus Gibson, Tyler Moeller, they came in and played well too, and you’ve got a lot of guys to play through, and whenever there’s competition like that, it’s going to bear the whole group.
GRANT: We’ve got a lot of depth on the inside and Todd Denlinger and Dexter Larimore, they all played good for us today. We look so much to those guys that we’ve got to get them to push a little more and get a lot more blockage off the line, but they did a good job today for us and we kept a lot of rotation and stayed fresh.
REPORTER: For the offensive guys over here, Kirk and Dionte, to come out and be able to throw the football, what you guys did the first series, I mean 16 yards,41 yards the first two plays, do you think in a sense that was a good way to start it out, indicates you’ll be able to attack teams up top potentially as the season goes on?
JOHNSON: Definitely. Like Coach said, we’re planning on working on our passing game and I don’t know what the script was or anything like that, but I believe that it helps a lot with confidence and things like that for Todd and it was good that we made big plays and we showed them we’re still capable of doing those things and we don’t have to rely so much on the run like so many people expected, so it definitely was a plus.
REPORTER: You talked all week about the validity of playing this game against a I-AA team. When you all walked in, Michigan had just taken the lead for the first time against Appalachian State. After playing these guys, talk about what you’re tasting when you’re playing an upper level I-AA team.
COACH TRESSEL: I think the reality of I-AA in this day and age is all the good I-AA teams have a significant number of transfers that have played at this level previously. So as you go out there, there’s guys that have been on these kinds of fields before and they play hard. I thought they had a good football team watching them on film. I thought they were a very solid football team. You don’t get into the Final Four of, what is it, the championship division playoff division, unless you’re good. There will be someone Double A teams prove that this week, I suppose. So it’s right along with the philosophy that we said back when they went with the 12th game that we were going to have an intersectional rivalry and we were going to play our in-state Division I teams. They’re very capable.
REPORTER: That said, though, were you surprised or shocked by the Appalachian State/Michigan score?
COACH TRESSEL: Appalachian State is good, they were watching them all week on film. I think they’ve won the championship like two years in a row, so they’re good.
REPORTER: Larry, what did it mean for you to be a captain and how were you selected this week?
GRANT: We have a rotation. We had James and Kirk and Dionte are the captains for the year, but we had a rotation for the fourth, and Coach Heacock chose me after we announced the captains and it was an honor for me, I’m happy about it, being able to show that I can lead and be able to help the team any way I can. So it was an honor to me.
REPORTER: Is Beanie sound? It looked like he was inattentive or there was just nothing at the line. What was your view of that?
COACH TRESSEL: It depends on which ones. A couple goal line ones, I thought there was a couple of penetration. There were a couple out on the field that —
REPORTER: He had the one really good run.
COACH TRESSEL: He ripped off a good run. I think what we’ll find is we’d like a little bit better execution up front and we want a little bit better running. That will be the reality of the film and it was an interesting day from an offensive perspective, Youngstown State did a good deal of blitzing and bringing things that you better hit them just right or you may not gain and so forth, although it gave us the opportunity to be throwing against three-deep secondaries when they’re bringing those extra guys on the blitz. I thought Beanie did pretty fair. I don’t know that it was the best I’ve ever seen him, and he’s got to get better just like we’ve all got to get better.
REPORTER: Jim, did you get a chance to talk to Louis Irizarry out on the field?
COACH TRESSEL: After the game, I got a chance to talk to him, told him I was proud of the way he was playing, he’s a good football player, and he’s got to do a great job of finishing this year right and I wish for him that he gets another ring to put in the showcase at Youngstown.
REPORTER: Jim, when you’re on the sidelines the last few years you’ve talked to Troy Smith a different way than I’m sure you’ve talked to Todd this year, what are some of the similarities and differences you had before he goes out on the field trying to tell him what he needs to do?
COACH TRESSEL: I think my language has generally been the same. I didn’t change a tone with Troy any different than Craig or Justin or Scott McMullen or Steve Bellisari. It’s a teaching world out there and we talk a lot about what we think we’re seeing and what we need to be going to. And the good thing about Todd is he’s been there and understands the situation. Talking with Antonio and Robbie, you know, real teaching situation because it was the first time they were out there feeling like they were in the hunt for the situation, but we just try to teach.
REPORTER: Can you talk about Anderson Russell and just being back out on the field for the first time in a while and anything you saw in his face today?
COACH TRESSEL: I thought it was exciting getting him out there. I thought he did a good job on that kickoff return. I thought he might crease it at first. I’m sure the defense enjoyed having him flying around and all those things and we’ll have to get him out on the Jugs machine, make some catches this week in practice, because I thought he could have had an interception there but it was wonderful having Anderson back.
