Coach Day's Post Game Press Conference vs. Illinois
10/12/2025 9:18:00 AM | Football
On Jermaine Matthews:
“For Jermaine to move inside the way he did, says a lot about his preparation because it’s one thing to go through walkthrough, it’s another thing to go through practice. When you are now a nickel and you now have to fit the run, you have to hit the blitzes, the coverage, everything happens a little bit faster when you get closer to the ball. For him to be able to do that and play the way he did says a lot about his preparation, but also give credit to Tim Walton and the work that they did during the week. That was well done. Hopeful we can get Lorenzo back for next week. Depth is going to get challenged, and we talked adopt about this, when you have multiple guys that can play multiple positions, that’s creating depth. That was a good sign from Jermaine.”
On the state of the run game:
“I think we are running physical. We will look and see if there was more there because we always want to gain eight or nine yards a carry. When you get tight in the red zone, the expectations of those are going to be four or more, but we want to be four or more in every run outside of the ten yard line. We need to go look and see, is it a blocking issue? Is there a personnel issue? Are we blocking and then just getting what we blocked for? We have to look at all of those things. I thought the offensive line was moving people today when I watched the iPad , I’ll have to go back and watch the film. We were moving the line of scrimmage. There were some blocks that we lost across the board and then we have to figure out if the runs are hitting exactly right because some did, but others I thought maybe weren’t there and we need to figure out why that is.”
On what he has learned about this group throughout the season:
“One thing is, we keep pushing them about being consistent in their approach and so far we’ve go that. It’s a long road, we are only half way through the season. I think the guys we didn’t know about going into this season, they have now proven that they belong. Ok, now what do we want this team to look like as we continue to grow and build? So, that’s all been good. They’re competitive, they’re edgy, they like these type of environments and they want to be great and they expect to be great, they expect to win all the time. As much as I was on them about growing up and maturing, you are seeing a pretty mature group. They’re starting to learn really what it takes and they’re pulling for each other. I think the last thing is, and this is going to be a challenge for every team in the country including ours, is just as time goes on everyone has expectations when they come into a game, when they’re not met it’s easy to start pointing in different directions and that’s selfishness and I think our guys are very unselfish. I think they are coming together as a team and that is going to be one of the things that we have to make sure is an advantage for us.”
On Jeremiah Smith’s hit and coming back that drive to score:
“I can’t say enough about him and about Carnell. In a game like this when we found ourselves down in the red zone a lot, we ran the ball a lot and they’re into it just as much as everybody else. I mean, they want it to look like last week (Minnesota), every week, but when you have a team that understands what needs to be done, that’s when you have a chance to be special. He is a tough player. On that play, we had an opportunity to really have an X play. We had two guys there to block one and that didn’t happen. He ended up taking a shot that we don’t want to see happen, but he was able to recover. He is a tough player.”
