Postgame Press Conference Transcript (OSU vs. Ohio) – Ohio State Buckeyes
9/18/2010 12:00:00 AM | Football
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Video: Highlights | Head Coach Jim Tressel | Ohio State Players
Audio: Ohio Head Coach Frank Solich
COACH TRESSEL: I thought our guys did a good job coming off an emotional, physical week a week ago and I thought they prepared well. They had a lot of respect for Ohio University, as they should. A lot of them remembered that a couple years ago it was a dog fight and I thought we came in, I thought we seized control of the game early, which the biggest challenge you have is keeping your execution at a high pitch after that point, but I thought the kids played hard and got a lot of guys into the game. And again, you have 70 or so snaps from each side of the ball to study and see if we can get better.
REPORTER: Terrelle put himself in the record books today with 16 straight completions. Can you talk about maybe where he started, where he’s come and maybe in history when you think about the Troy Smiths and the Tomczaks, the Schlichters and the Rex Kerns, what that says.
COACH TRESSEL: Well, regardless of — well, 16 in a row is pretty good. I didn’t realize it until they mentioned it after the game, that’s darn good. He was 22-29, which is pretty fair. I think he would like to have a couple of those back. Interceptions ruin a quarterback’s day in their own mind, and sometimes you forget about the 22 completions and all you do is think about the two that didn’t work well, but as we’ve been saying all along, Terrelle is a film guy, he’s a study guy, he’s not happy — he’ll be happy when he has 29 straight and that’s all we’ve called, that’s just his nature and that’s why you love working with him because he loves to work.
REPORTER: Coach, in the first half, you’re up 34-0 at the half, is that — I mean, were you pleased with every aspect of the game in the first half because there was the interception, but as far as defensively they didn’t allow —
COACH TRESSEL: Defensively we shut them down in the first half for sure. We let that kickoff return out.The problem is, if you get blocked in the back out of one lane, they happen to hit that lane, it is going to go out. But for the most part I thought it was a solid first half and the challenge at halftime really was to ignore what they might do and just see if we can go out there and keep our focus and concentration so that we can progress. And we wanted to have maybe a drive or two with the ones and a couple three and outs with the ones on defense and see if we could get a good, long period with the other guys playing, and it probably wasn’t quite that good, but I thought we did a lot of good things. And, you know, it’s hard to not feel good about a win.I didn’t want those guys down there in that locker room feeling as if it’s not fun to hear that bell ringing.
REPORTER: Coach, a lot of the talk during spring practice was that you were going to throw to Stoneburner a lot during the season.
COACH TRESSEL: Who talked about that?
REPORTER: You did.
COACH TRESSEL: I was going to say, I didn’t remember talking about that. Go ahead.
REPORTER: Can you talk about your plans with Jake?
COACH TRESSEL: Well, just like with all the tight ends we’ve ever had, they’re part of the passing game. Sometimes it’s as a protecter, just like a back is, and other times it’s part of the route. And if he’s the guy that’s open, then we certainly want to go to him. I think Jake is a talented receiver and he came down from outside, if you know what I mean. He was a wide guy and now he’s down, so he has a good feel for what’s going on out there and a feel for how to sit in holes and so forth, so he gets himself in position to get the ball thrown to him and I think Reid had a catch as well. But it wasn’t like we said at the beginning of the week, we’re going to throw to tight ends because the guys on Radio 1290 or whatever said to do it, so —
REPORTER: Jim, just talk about the play of Cameron Heyward today, kind of set the tone a little bit, he and Tyler Moeller flying around, obviously that’s what you like to see in a game like this.
COACH TRESSEL: Cam was rolling down the field with the ball again. Cam’s a great player. He’s hard to block. He’s not a sometimes guy. You know, sometimes you turn the film on and you look at people and you say, oh, man, when that guy cranks it up, he’s good. Well, Cam cranks it up every play, in practice. In fact, Jim Heacock has to take him out of practice at times so he doesn’t disrupt the entire practice. I think it’s in part because he doesn’t want him getting banged up, but Cam’s a great player. I mean, there can’t be too many others any better than him at that position in the country. And then who’s the other one you said, Tyler Moeller? Yeah, you know, Tyler out there, every time I see him out there, you know, I smile because a year ago at this time he was a miserable guy.He was not fun to be around. He was not happy. He’s not happy when he’s not playing, when he’s not in the locker room talking about defenses and how to stop the opposing offense and all that. And so every time he’s out there, it’s a good time and he’s going to play fast and play hard and make a difference for us.
REPORTER: Jim, you mentioned the kick return that was called back. You had the punt blocked. Talked a lot this week about special teams. Overall how do you think you did in that category and does that detract from the fact that you won pretty handedly.
COACH TRESSEL: Well, everything that didn’t go well detracts from it. The victory’s good. Okay, now that aside, you evaluate every play. I thought Ben’s last couple punts were really good. We just flat out missed a guy on the punt that was blocked, and you can’t do that, not if you want to win. And it gave the defense a sudden change opportunity and they rose up and stopped him. So there was something good that came out of it. It was an experience for them. But return-wise, Jordan, I thought, did a nice job returning a punt or two. I guess we only got two kickoff returns. One was — or three counting one after a safety. I don’t think any of them were out of this world, but it will be fun to watch some of those cover guys on kickoff to see if we got better, if we learned lessons. Jordan Hall moved up from the second kickoff unit to the first unit. It will be fun to see — he’s the one that got blocked in the back, but it will be fun to see if he’s going to be a real positive force there.
REPORTER: You mentioned your thought process on wanting Terrelle Pryor and the offense to go out on a good note. Did you end up playing him a little longer than you wanted? What were you thinking in the third quarter?
COACH TRESSEL: A little bit depending upon the score. If we’d have scored right away, we might have taken that group out, and I don’t know that he played at all when it was 43, so our thought was — as I mentioned, our hope was to go out there and score on the opening drive and stop them on that ensuing drive and put all the other guys in and I think a punt block had something to do with derailing that thinking.
REPORTER: Jim, was this one of the records you wouldn’t have expected from Terrelle necessarily because I think we all thought he’d put up big total offense numbers, maybe big rushing numbers, but was this a product of work in the zone?
COACH TRESSEL: It’s hard to make six in a row unless no one ever did it, or is this a tie? Is this a record? It must be hard to do. We’ve been throwing the ball all over the place for a lot of years. That’s a joke, Bill. You started writing! You know, so it’s hard, so I don’t know if we can look for that or not. I know this, Terrelle was not happy after last week’s game. He’s not happy unless he’s a 60 plus percent guy, that’s just the standards he sets for himself. He was 48 or whatever it was last weekend and for good yards, but he was not pleased with that. And I know he worked very hard on being a high percent guy, but I doubt very seriously if he was sitting in his room last night hoping to hit sixteen in a row because sometimes you throw it away because it’s the right thing to do. So that was a good job and nothing would surprise me, though, from him, I guess to answer your question, whether it would be breaking a rushing record, a passing record, a longest play record, a consecutive completion record, he’s capable of everything because he’s blessed with tremendous talent, but most especially his work ethic is fantastic.
REPORTER: Cameron (INAUDIBLE QUESTION)
HEYWARD: Just the right place at the right time, but the quarterback tackled me. It’s not good enough.
REPORTER: Can I start the questions out with Dane this week? We’ll get him on early. Really for you and Brandon. Terrelle set a record today for 16 consecutive passes that he completed, that’s an Ohio State record. Both of you caught five passes today, of course. Talk about Terrelle’s performance out there today starting with Dane and then with Brandon.
SANZENBACHER: I think what you’ve been able to see not only through the season but through his time here is that his consistency has improved every year. It’s something we preached about all the off season and coming into the season that when you feel more comfortable, things start to slow down for you and you can make those passes, and I think being able to throw those passes so comfortably, it lead to all those completions. Obviously you don’t think about, okay, I want to complete every one, but in those places he can really focus on where to place the ball.
SAINE: Definitely, he has a lot of confidence out there. He knows the offense so well. He knows exactly where everybody’s going to be. He can find the open receiver a lot easier. He did a really good job of that today.
REPORTER: For the offense guys again, even beyond Terrelle’s completions, just what you guys did offensively in the first half. Did you feel like sort of the offense was on a roll? Can you talk about what you did as a group if you felt like that was what you were looking for in a game like this? Bryant, you can start.
BROWNING: Well, I felt, first of all, I think our defense did a great job, getting multiple turnovers, getting the ball to us in good field position. I feel we did a better job than last week of scoring touchdowns, we had chances at it. Definitely we have a lot of things we can get better at, especially looking at the running game and things like that, but today I feel like we did an okay job, but we have a lot of things we can improve on.
REPORTER: For Bryant and for Ross, they blocked a punt and had you guys kind of pinned in a little bit there, what was the defensive mindset when you all came out and you ended up forcing the turnover and getting the ball back? I know you all are hungry for shutouts, was that the talk when you got back on the field?
HOMAN: It’s kind of a sudden change in a situation and it’s kind of one of our goals as a defense, anytime something like that happens, always come out on the ball, huddle up, get the call, kind of settle down and just play, but definitely always try to keep them out of the end zone no matter what.
ROLLE: It was just a sudden change, when it happened, it was kind of like the defense is going to do it again. We felt like when they did make a turnover, we didn’t go out there and panic, we just did our job.
BROWNING: We went through the whole week of practice and it was kind of some of the quarterbacks, they were very good quarterback-wise, as a whole, in practice we were kind of prepared for both guys, so today whoever was out there we would be well prepared for.
REPORTER: I just wanted to ask, you guys probably had the challenge all week not coming out flat and setting the tone, is there something different about this year’s team defensively that you can do that that you don’t have letdowns?
ROLLE: I feel like we have guys, seniors as well as on defense coming out of the locker room that we can’t come out and play flat no matter what team you play on. Cam in the locker room says we’ve got to get going early, we’ve got to let guys know that. Yeah, it was Ohio this week and we were able to go out there and play hard and come out fast, but if you come out flat, the scoreboard probably would have been a little different, so it’s always good to have guys in the locker room to get guys up.
HEYWARD: I think we all just said it, that we can’t have any letdowns, we were thinking about the OU game two years ago and we didn’t want to let down our fans. I think everybody took the challenge. They have really good quarterbacks and we had to prepare hard for them, and on offense, I think they did a great job today converting the red zone and it was just a great team effort.
REPORTER: Cam, just on the safety, just take us through that. What did you see, you came free, et cetera, and what was it like to score?
HEYWARD: I was thinking about that. I thought I was going to get production points for a defensive score, but the main thing was I just shot the gap and it was just from a great play call and I was just in the right place at the right time.
