Postgame Transcript From No. 3 Ohio State vs. Ohio – Ohio State Buckeyes
9/6/2008 12:00:00 AM | Football
No. 3/3 Ohio State (2-0, 0-0 Big Ten) 26, Ohio University (0-2, 0-0 Mid-American) 14
Ohio Stadium
Columbus, Ohio
Sept. 6, 2008
Attendance: 105,002
Ohio State Postgame Press Conference Transcript
COACH TRESSEL: Well, I just told the guys in the locker room that I wasn’t exactly sure what all the prior 799 wins looked like, but we’re still proud to get number 800 for Ohio State. One of the only five schools in the history of the game to be able to do that. It’s quite a privilege to be on the field when that occurs.
Obviously you were there as well as we were and I guess the way that I would take a nut shell look at it would be, it kind of looked like everyone predicted you might look like in between your opener and your big “national stage game,” which is disappointing, because we really needed to make progress and we did make progress in the take-away area, which was huge. It’s got to be something we continue to do. It was good to see us hit a homerun on a punt return. Although, I’m a little nervous that we might have been close to having a block in the back, we’ll see. And we’ve got a lot of work to do and the good news is, we’re 2-0 and it’s September and hopefully we can get a lot better.
REPORTER: Jim, with 27 seniors on this team, you said you were disappointed that the game looked like this, did you think maybe this group would not allow that to happen to maybe have what looked like a letdown before USC?
COACH TRESSEL: I don’t think you ever point a finger in that direction. It’s collectively. We’ve got lots of coaches. We’ve got lots of us, there’s young guys, seniors, coaches, everybody. So I would never say that I’m disappointed in the seniors because that happened or I’m solely disappointed in myself because that happened. I think we have to share all of it and first we have to evaluate our own performance and be willing to begin there.
REPORTER: If you wouldn’t call it a letdown, Coach, was this a fluke, maybe if you played them 10 times they wouldn’t be within 12 points?
COACH TRESSEL: I can’t answer that. We only get to play them once. The day we played them the score was 26-14, whatever it was, I don’t know.
REPORTER: Coach, up next, USC. Obviously you mentioned that. Just your thoughts on that game.
COACH TRESSEL: Well, we’ll have to play better than we did this game, that’s for sure, but we haven’t had a chance really to study them. I got to catch the back half of their first game on TV and they were very impressive. I think everyone knows that they’re a great football team, but the key to the game for us will be us. And the key to the game for them will be them and we’ll see which team’s better, but that’s why we’ve got to go to work on us.
REPORTER: Jim, over here. Obviously you missed Beanie. You could maybe address that a little bit, but what were your guys telling you about the feedback about why things weren’t working on the offensive line today? What was the feedback you were getting?
COACH TRESSEL: I wasn’t having much conversation with the offensive linemen. I know Jim Bollman and Jim Peterson were and they were talking things through, here’s what’s going on and so forth and so on, but our guys typically, whether it’s this year or any other year don’t typically come out and make excuses about, we’ve never seen that, or I slipped or anything like that, just we didn’t play to the best of our ability every snap, every guy, and we didn’t coach to the best of our ability every snap, every guy. If we did, I think we would have played better, but I don’t — I really don’t know what the feedback, per se, was.
REPORTER: What was your plan going in for quarterback rotation? Did you hope to get all three guys in? Did you play Pryor as much as you wanted to?
COACH TRESSEL: You always hope to get as many guys as you can. We wanted to get our whole second offense in either the third or the fourth series and I can’t remember which one it was, I think it was the fourth maybe that we got them in, and they just — they need to play to learn more about this game. And in fact, Terrelle was actually going to go in before Ray’s punt return because I felt like we were going to get the ball near mid field and I said to Coach Bolls, I said, “Why don’t we have Terrelle see if he could take this?” Whatever the score was, 6-point score, what was it, 19? And Coach Bolls says, “You sure you want to put him under pressure like that?” And I said, “When would you like his first pressure to be?” But then Ray took it back to the house and then he played the last five minutes or something.
REPORTER: Coach, for as frustrated as you are about the offense, the defense only allowed a touchdown again and you talked this week about this was a great opportunity for the Ohio University players to come up here, and could you talk about the efforts of the Bobcats?
COACH TRESSEL: Yeah, without a doubt, Ohio University had a good frame of mind, played hard and went after it, just like you knew they would, just that’s who they are. And as we said at the outset, when you get five take-aways, that’s a heck of a progress thing, so you love seeing that happen. We have pretty high standards when we look at our defense and I’ll bet you we will have had more missed tackles than we think is appropriate, maybe I’m wrong, but just from where I was standing, we don’t miss tackles like that. But, no, our defense, holding people to 7 points and giving us field position when we should have been up, but you have to do what’s needed and they kept coming up with what was needed.
REPORTER: Jim, you sort of didn’t really elaborate on the question about Beanie. Would you talk about that? You played with who you’ve got, but there were times today when it looked like you could have used him.
COACH TRESSEL: Tim said he was going to ask me about Beanie later, is the way he phrased the question, didn’t you, Tim?
REPORTER: Yeah, I misphrased it.
COACH TRESSEL: I always follow Tim’s guidance. But you love to have all your guys and you like to have your veterans. You like to have the guys in the huddle that can have that presence and create that energy and so forth, but sometimes you don’t and you’ve got to — you’ve got to be just as good when you don’t but of course we would have loved to have him.
REPORTER: Coach last week you emphasized red zone efficiency, what are your thoughts on today’s game?
COACH TRESSEL: Well, how many times did we get there? What did we get there, the first time and had to kick a field goal, right? Did we get there any other times? On a touchdown drive, yeah. So I’d like to be a hundred percent and so it sounds like we were one for two if we have our numbers right there. If you’re going to win, you’re going to need to get every point possible and we’ve got to do that.
TODD BOECKMAN: First of all, offensively, we need to get a lot better. We did some things out there we’re not very proud of. Made some mistakes. You’ve got to give a lot of credit to OU. We knew they were going to do it, they came and did it, came at us. I guess the defense baled us out a few times. The special teams helped us out a little bit. We’ve got to go out there play harder, faster, stronger, just do everything a little bit better and I think hopefully next week we’ll pick it up a little bit and carry it on and keep going.
BRIAN ROBISKIE: I think that this is one of the games you’re not excited to get back and watch the films, something you’ve got to do and this is one of those games where you’re going to learn the most from it. I know offensively this is a game we learned a lot about ourselves. I think coming out, you’ve got to give a lot of credit to OU, coming out, like Coach Tress said, we knew they would, they came in here fired up. We know we just can’t stumble at the gate, we have a habit of doing it in the past and we can’t do that, especially next week, going on the road, we’re not going to be able to do that and be successful, so we’ve got to break down the film and move on.
JAMES LAURINAITIS: I think the defense needs to get a lot better as well. I think we’re going look at the film and see we had too many missed tackles like Coach said. If you look at the rushing yards, a lot of that was quarterback scrambles, so we have to make tackles when we have the opportunity to make tackles. Obviously when you get as many take-aways as we did, that’s a good thing. You never like to see a team kind of move down the field and get a lengthy drive on you, so I think that’s something we’ve got to go back and look at what went wrong and practice on tackling and we’ve got to get a lot better for next week.
MALCOLM JENKINS: I think today was good experience for us as a team. Defensively they had a couple drives on us, something we didn’t see in the first game, so going into this week, it’s something we needed to see because SC has the offense to be able to do that. Offensively, it was a new thing for them to get tested, and I think SC also has a defense that’s going to test them, so I think it was a good experience for us as a team just to face some adversity going into this next week because we’re going to face a lot of it going away on the road and a night game in a hostile environment. We needed to see some things like that, but not everybody’s bad. Boom Herron, he stepped up to fill in the slot for Beanie. We played good in the second half, but we’ve got to start out faster and get things going.
REPORTER: Todd, do you think this is a case of them just playing lights out, you playing average or below? Fans are probably wondering is OU just 12 points worse than us?
TODD BOECKMAN: Probably a little bit of both. We knew they were going to come out fired up, playing a team like Ohio State, they knew they wanted to come in here and just go out there and play as hard as they could. They did all the right things except turn the ball over a few times. You have to give them a lot of credit, they did some good things out there on defense.
REPORTER: Malcolm, Coach Tressel said this looked like a game that people might expect between the opener and a big game like USC next week maybe would be a letdown game, did you feel that at all before kickoff that guys weren’t ready and did you think that did factor in at all today that you were looking ahead to USC?
MALCOLM JENKINS: No, I think actually surprisingly everybody was really into this game. I think the enthusiasm pregame was higher than it was last week. I think everybody was ready to play, it just came down to execution. You know, one guy not being in his third or whatever it was, it was just the execution, but as far as being up for a game and playing hard, I think everybody played hard, we just didn’t play well.
REPORTER: James, how difficult is it to scheme all week for one quarterback and then face another that looked like a different mold for essentially the entire game?
JAMES LAURINAITIS: Well, I think if you watch back on film of the two guys, they’re kind of mirror images of each other. We knew they were both athletic guys, both at the scramble, at throwing the run, the first one got knocked out of the game and the second one comes in, you’ve got to know on film they both looked exactly the same, they like to do the same things and like Malcolm said, they just executed a few times where sometimes we’ve got to make the play instead of them and we have somebody in our grasp, we’ve got to bring them down, if you’re containing, you’ve got to keep containing, if you’re blitzing, you’ve got to get there, just a matter of us not executing.
REPORTER: I know you’re a little bummed out now, but overall, how quick do your thoughts turn to USC and your thoughts on the Trojans?
MALCOLM JENKINS: Well, that’s all it is is the Trojans. A win is a win. We still got a W at the end of the day, so now all the focus goes on to SC and I’m pretty sure everybody will be focusing and trying to get better this week.
REPORTER: Brian or Todd, did you guys feel like you were searching to kind of hit a switch out there, either to turn it on emotionally?
BRIAN ROBISKIE: Emotionally, like Malcolm said, you could sense the guys were ready pregame last night and going into this morning, you could sense that we wanted to get out there, we were ready to go, but like he said, it’s all about execution. Offensively, if one or two guys isn’t doing his job, it kind of messes up everybody else. So we just have to make sure that we’re all executing on every play from the start.
