Story by NU Athletic Communications
On Coach Greg Schiano “There’s lots of coaches who are regarded as the best coaches in college football. Not many could do what he’s done. Speaking as a guy who won at Temple, you go win at Rutgers, not many people have won there. He won at a high level and he came back and he’s winning on a high level. He’s a great football coach zero point blank. He’s a great builder. He’s elevated that entire university. I have the utmost respect for him. When he speaks, I listen. I just have a lot of respect for him.”
On Gunnar Gottula “I think Gunnar (Gottula) played well. There’s some things he wants to continue to work his anchor on. He’s getting more speed and power on him. He continues to work on it. That’s the really important thing this week. There’s no better coached defensive front you’ll see than the Rutgers D-Line. I think our guys know that from playing them two years ago. What I like about Rutgers is that there’s not a lot of transfers. There’s a lot of homegrown talent. A lot of tough northeast kids that play really hard. Gunnar (Gottula) will have to do better. That’s credit to our guys on our scout team. We have a lot of guys that have played a lot of football on our scout team that give them a really good look.”
On Javin Wright “Javin (Wright) went in as a nickel and dime role. When this first happened we never thought he’d be able to play at this point. Dr. (Tabatha) Matthias and our team doctor and the work he’s done with our specialists. We were hoping for maybe USC. The hard part about my job is that I only get called in when it’s the heartbreaking conversations. I’m not the position coach, I’m not there for the day-to-day good ones. I was there for that one with Javin (Wright) and his father, just like I was with Rahmir (Johnson) last year when his season was over. Those things are heartbreaking, so just to see the joy on Javin’s face to play was a moment that will stay with me for a while. How he played doesn’t necessarily even matter to be quite honest, but I think he played well. He’ll play more this week. He hasn’t been able to do a thing. It wasn’t like he was coming back from an ankle, he was dealing with blood clots so he hasn’t done a thing. He said, ‘I’m a ninth-year senior’ or whatever he is, so he has a lot of reps in the bank.”
On Tommi Hill’s status and other injuries “Tommi (Hill) went out like the NFL, about two hours before the game and worked out and just didn’t feel like he could quite go on it. He ran today and it felt good. I would anticipate Tommi (Hill) getting a chance to play this week. That will probably be another gametime decision. The plantar fasciitis is all pain threshold so it’s not like you can tough it out. I’ve seen guys miss a long time with it. He’s doing everything he can to play, so we’ll see.”
On Micah Mazzccua “I wouldn’t start him. He was a back up before this happened. When he came out of the Colorado game, Tossy was put ahead of him. I love Micah (Mazzccua). I’m working with him to make him the best that he can be. You guys talk a lot about him, but he’s a backup player for us. Micah (Mazzccua) was suspended last week, so he was reinstituted this week. That was the middle of the week that it happened, so that wasn’t something I was anticipating to be quite honest.”
On Stefon Thompson “Stefon Thompson has a sprained foot, but he ran quite well today. We’re anticipating him to practice tomorrow.”
On the officiating in the Purdue game “You send in questions you have. They’ll send you back whether they agree or disagree. There’s a weekly tape that they send you that has points of emphasis from the week before. It’s from the whole league, so you can hear what’s being said to the officials. If it’s something that rises to a higher level, you might get on the phone with someone. I got a penalty because I injected myself in the game so I made a call to figure out what I did right or wrong. You just send your plays in and get them back and they tell you what they agree or disagree. As much as anything, you’re trying to figure out as the rules change, can we do this can we not do this. What used to be a great play is now a penalty sometimes.”
On Alex Bullock “Alex (Bullock) was one of those guys we talked about in the team meeting. We ran that play earlier in the game. They run with motion so if you send a guy in jet motion, they chase them. Last week Oregon State had a lot of success with handing the ball off. For the past two years, that’s kind of one of the things you do against Purdue is you hand off jet sweeps. They made the decision, we actually practiced it, to rock and roll the safeties, which is a little more complex, but it’s better in terms of sweep speed. On the first one, Alex is going to go block the man-to-man guy, but the man-to-man guy doesn’t come. He sees a safety, he tries to veer off, he goes to block them and then misses them, so it’s a 4 yard gain. They get a 15 yard penalty for throwing his legs or whatever. I yelled at Alex on the sideline, he was about ready to fight me. They ran it again, Alex sees it and makes the block. Jacory runs for a touchdown. Alex turns around and does this passionate movement. I don’t know if he was telling me to get lost or if he was just fired up. It’s those kinds of things we’re really trying to build off of. Preparing through the event, seeing how people are playing you, what do we need to do differently this game based upon what they’re doing. We’re in warm-ups and number 4 goes from playing middle linebacker to edge player and figuring out how we’re going to play this. Now no longer is 31 the deep safety, now he’s down low, 32 is a deep safety. That’s the hard thing about playing a team that’s struggling. They’ve lost two games, so they’re probably going to make some fundamental changes. Alex is more and more and more becoming the guy who the coaches or Dylan (Raiola) will be like ‘can I have Alex on this play.’ He’s the guy that figures out how to get the job done, especially on special teams. He was excellent on special teams. The issue with special teams is that field goals were so front and center that it was a heck of a day for Brian Buschini. Five touchbacks in hurricane type conditions. Amazing tackle that lit the team up. He was able to field both those snaps that were really bad snaps, get them down, and then made both tackles on those plays. The first one should’ve been down at the 2, and one at the 10 and one at the 4. Buschini was magnificent. Bullock was an unsung hero, a guy that no one is noticing.”
On turnovers overall “Yes. I thought that if we could just not turn the ball over, we would have a chance. Games will be close, we’ll have a chance to win the game at the end. I didn’t probably prepare for us being as explosive as we are. Even in the first half, I showed our guys – forgive me, the numbers might be off – 32 plays for 210 yards in the first half, 27 plays for 208 yards in the second half. It wasn’t like we weren’t explosive. What you’re seeing, I think, is you’re seeing other people slow the game down, run the ball, try to bleed our defense, try to keep us off the field. You could see a quarterback going out there and saying ‘I’m going to be extra aggressive because I’m not getting a lot of plays.’ We played 57 plays on offense. What I like about Dylan (Raiola) is he’s checking the ball down, he’s getting completions, he’s moving the ball. I think the turnover margin, we’ve won it in every game except one where we tied it. Even in the game we lost, we won the turnover margin. I’d still love to see us get way more. We have five sacks, but no sacks with fumbles. That’s not good enough. I say that because the guys in our meeting – Ty Robinson – comes and barrels through and sacks the quarterback, he’s the first one to say ‘I should’ve knocked the ball out there.’ There are a lot of places we have to improve.”
On creating explosive plays and what the offense has done better than he thought they would “I think we’ve had the ability to get the ball to a bunch of different people. You can’t sit there and key in on ‘hey, they really like to favor (Isaiah) Neyor, hey they really like to favor this guy.’ If you throw in the pass interferences, I think we had seven 20+ yard plays, I think that would’ve been 10, 11, 12. We’re able to go out and throw general tempo dropbacks, and we’re holding up in protections. Emmett (Johnson) and Rahmir (Johnson) were excellent at blitzes. I think that’s allowed us to do some catch and run type things. There’s some things I’d like to see more of. We weren’t great in the red zone. The first half, we were 0-for-2 in the red zone and we were 2-for-2 in the second half, which is why the game changed. Third down was disappointing. You look at it, it was 4th and 1 and we false started. It was 3rd and 1 and we false started. I told our guys, it’s time for grown man football. ‘I thought I heard him call it’ – enough of that. If we can stay on the field a little bit more, maybe get a few more turnovers with the defense, we’ll really see some explosive things happen. You face some teams like Rutgers, who don’t give up explosive plays. They make you earn it. Coach (Greg) Schiano doesn’t give up explosive plays. They’re going to play quarters, they’re going to make you earn it. They will pressure you. We’re built like we want you to pressure us, we get the ball out of our hand. They sit there and play three or four quarters with rugged, rugged players and they’ll try to knock you back into the quarterback’s lap. It’s a whole different animal that we’re facing this week with the way they play.”
On if Rutgers’ game versus Washington is a template “I think they are in the top two or three. They convert third downs 51 percent. They have 33 minutes in time possession. They are top 10 in red zone defense. Washington had a ton of yards, but they were one for five for touchdowns in the red zone. Even the touchdown we scored, we had to go on fourth and inches to get it in. So, for us we are throwing the ball around decently. Can we get the tough yards? Can we get the fourth and one? Can we get the third and one without everything having to be a speed sweep? Can we line up and knock them back and go and get that yard. We need to look at the things that we are not doing well. So it’s hard tough yards that I am anxious to see.”
On Rutgers blocking kicks and how they will address it “Last week wasn’t the field goal protection team. It was the snapper. If you’re kicking the ball at one five. To me, it’s the snapper. We practice so much on special teams, on field goals, on punts, all those things. If there’s a problem, we will fix it. But if you have to start changing things now, then we are panicked. We know what to do. I mean that sincerely, we know what to do and we have the guys who can do it. They have to go do it. That’s the phase we are in. You have to hear me talk about winning football, championship football. You can’t be a different guy and practice than you are in the games. We’re making those kicks in practice everyday. I expect us to make them in the games. So, they are going to come after us. They should come after us. One thing we are doing is, after the first punt, if you go back to the last couple of games, the punters are getting the ball against us at 1.1, 1.2 in the balls are going 30 to 45 yards and going out of bounds. Our punt rush team hasn’t made the big play that everyone goes wow with. But the field is being tilted in our favor. We are getting the ball at the 35 yard line. They are getting the ball at the five. If anything, I am coachable. I watch Coach (Kirk) Ferentz and these guys. I am like, ‘Okay, how are the winning in these elements?’ The elements haven’t shown up yet but they are going to come after us. We have good players. They have to play well and that’s really been my message to the team is you can’t all of the sudden change who you are. If you’re going to be fast be fast. If you’re going to be tough be tough and it will be against a really good Rutgers team.”
On Ceyair Wright “He’s really smart. At the end of the day if you’re smart and you try, you have a chance. Some guys play football because they are talented. Some guys play because they are football players. I don’t know if that makes sense. Some people lift weights because they are lifters. Some people run because they are runners. Ceyair (Wright) is a football guy. He is a football player. He shows up and you’re not pulling teeth. We have some guys who are really talented and you’re trying to get to be a football player and they want to be everything else. Ceyair’s a football guy. He’s played a ton of football at a high level at USC. The moment is not too big for him. He likes to compete. He had to learn our way of doing things. Our way of practice. He’s a really good person. So when you do correct him on something like ‘hey, here’s what we expect.’ He does it. I think John Butler has done a really good job. (Rashaan) Melvin and Adam DiMichele and Tariq (Thompson) help him. They do a good job of getting him to represent. If you go back to that game we had Mario Buford in there playing. We rotated more guys. Jeremiah Charles got real reps, so we wanted to get more people in the games and be fresh in the fourth quarter.”
On Dylan Raiola going to a silent cadence and if this is rare “The thing we’ve done with Dylan is we’ve said everything in life happens for a reason. I had a chance to work with a guy named Ben McAdoo at the end of my Carolina time. It didn’t work out for us, but Ben had been with (Mike) McCarthy and all those guys in the Green Bay. The way they train you in Green Bay, they start the year off, here’s our four or five man beaters. Here’s our zero bit beaters. Here’s our cadences. When you have a guy like Aaron Rodgers you train them that way and pretty soon he has all the answers to the test. So what we do with Dylan from day one is however we want Dylan to play as a junior, we are trying to coach him that way now. Same thing with Danny Kaelin. Here’s your cadences. Here’s your checks. Here’s your audibles. Before the half, they brought 0 in and he checked the route to Rahmir (Johnson) and just missed him. We’re living with those things. I could have just won them but if we have coached them up and they’ve put the system in that’s really high level stuff because he can. He works at reps. I’m in my office earlier today, and he (Dylan) steps into my office and talks about things they do and asks ‘Can I do this? Can I do that?’ I think he’s rare. I think the confidence the coaching staff has given him to go do it and I think his preparation is way, way over here.”
On veteran receivers “They are growing too. They are in territory they haven’t been in before. They haven’t been 4-1 right? I don’t know how many road games they’ve won. They haven’t done those things. So, it’s this humble confidence to stand your ground. Be confident in the things you know you’re confident about, but also be humble and say ‘Hey, what do we need to improve on?’ Can you come in this week and can you have the same edge to you as you had last week about what we need to get better at. At the same time being confident. Knowing that they are good players. They have worked hard. A lot of those guys, they are all growing. I don’t think it’s age as much as it is ‘hey, what does this take?’ What does this require? You watch Purdue and they gave up, I don’t know how many yards they gave up to Notre Dame, but it was a bad day. They gave up 300 and some yards rushing to Oregon State. We don’t really have a running quarterback and their defensive head coach is not going to give up 200, 300 yards rushing three games in a row. He’s just not going to do it. They played man and left their guys on an island out there, so we went and threw those balls. I think our guys are learning that ‘Hey, just because we’re winning a few games, now people are going to be different against us.’ I’ve got to recognize what’s happening in the game. This is a cover two game. Them seeing the preparation. The things that we are working on showing up. Like, Barrett Liebentritt had the same play in practice, and it looked very good. We showed it to the whole team. He got in the game and he absolutely took out two guys. Practice matters. The guy that he hit in practice was Marques Buford, who is a two ACLs, bad shoulder, bad hit, bad neck, but he plays in every play, but he’s out there in his blackshirt competing. So I think, those older guys, being coachable. They still have a lot of say in things. Even some of the discipline issues that I’m dealing with guys on the team. I take those things like the leadership council like ‘hey, how do you guys think we should handle this?’ I haven’t done that in a long time but I am taking it to them because it matters. I don’t want to talk about the guys that aren’t doing things right. I have so many guys who are doing things right. I am just blessed to have guys like Tommi Hill battling to play and to get back out there.”
On Emmett Johnson and if he needs to rethink how he runs the running back group “I said last week that we’d like to get him more involved. Maybe a little bit earlier, we should’ve. I still think there’s a rhythm to it. Tackling Dante (Dowdell) is really hard. On the first touchdown drive, that’s a 2nd and 1 or 2nd and 2 and Dante bounces the ball outside and there’s two defenders there and he sets his pads and he runs right through them. If we ask Rahmir (Johnson) and Emmett to do all those things early in the game, they’re not going to be explosive late in the game. Having the big backs, you just have to understand that they’re setting the tone for the run game. What I loved about what Emmett did was that Emmett caught the ball out of the backfield, he picked up blitzes, the first guy never tackled him. We have our little keys to the game and one of the things for this week was get the ball to the perimeter and be untackleable. Don’t let them tackle you. Even an outside zone, when he cuts back, he gets nine yards because the first guy is never really tackling Emmett. I’m watching Gabe (Ervin Jr.) practice last week. Gabe came off of a major injury, he’s getting his swagger back. (Kwinten) Ives can go in and play. I like what Emmett did. Emmett deserves to keep playing. He was one of the ones we singled out out there, just because he did so many things. Maybe it wasn’t one huge play, he certainly built me up after my penalty, which I appreciate. I’m very grateful for that.”
On Rutgers’ Running Back Kyle Monangai “He’s like the Matrix. Nothing ever hits him. He’s running and he has such elite body balance and contact balance. He sees it coming, so no one ever gets a true shot on him. It’s always a glancing blow. I think he’s really, really, really a great player. Their offensive line coach, Pat (Flaherty), he was like my mentor when I was at New York. One thing I know about Flahts is that they’re going to set their pads and come off the ball. They’re going to be well-coached, they’re going to be physical. You watch their guys, when there’s a pile, their guys are running into the pile and trying to knock it forward. That’s the kind of offense people play against us – ‘we’re going to get 3, 4, 5 yards to stay on the field and try to wear you down.’ That’s a heck of a challenge for us, and he brings in the element – they had him backed up against Washington and three guys hit him and he can run for 60. When he gets tired, they can bring in Sam Brown and he’s 227 pounds and an excellent back. They’ve got two of the best backs we’ll see.”
On how the defense is handling that style of play “I think we wouldn’t have been pleased with it in games three and four. Last game, I thought we were better at it. The way we play, with the amount of movement and pressure and all that, a play is going to hit now and then because we’re moving. I thought, to hold them to 52 yards rushing, they came in and were averaging a lot more than that. We prepared for the outside zones. We knocked the outside zones out pretty quickly, and then it became some of the downhill stuff. I think it was that first drive of the third quarter, the guys on the headset said they were going with the Illinois plan. Our guys on defense understand, Illinois hasn’t shown this but they’re going to against us. Rutgers is a difficult run game for us because of the way they run the football. They’re going to run duo, they run zone, they run the quarterback a great deal. The quarterback might be coming out to throw RPOs, but he’s an athletic player. We played against him at Minnesota. There’s a lot of really difficult challenges this week. It’ll be quite a test for our defense.”
On John Bullock “I like the fact that he is a fifth or sixth-year player, and he just keeps getting better. He’s the Will linebacker in Tampa 2 when he picked off versus three by one. They ran that same play twice before, and he almost went and got it, then he finally just went and got it. While he is a fifth-year player, he’s only played linebacker about 14 games. Last year we had Luke (Reimer) and Nick (Henrich) out there a bunch, and they rotated a bunch. He’s still a young player in terms of his development as a linebacker, but he gets better, and better, and better. He’s always working on something. He’s working on getting off blocks, or striking, or blitz patterns, or playing man. If all of our team was like John in terms of the constant search for improvement and deliberate practice, we’d have a hard time losing. He’s always trying to get better. Hopefully we get Stefon Thompson this week, we got Javin Wright back in the mix, and Vincent Shavers is really stepping up. John doesn’t have to play as many snaps so his snaps, he can make impact plays like he did. He’s really affecting the ball, he got his hand on the ball three times against Colorado, one against UNI, last week he took the ball away when he ripped it out. This week he picks the ball off. When we’re talking about turnover margin, we’re saying ‘the defense is taking the ball away’ really he’s taking the ball away. Even the play that Tommi (Hill) picked off, they wanted to throw the ball to the number two option, he rolled in the window, so Shedeur (Sanders) had to go outside to number one and he picked that ball off. John has just done a lot of nuanced things.”
On Ndamukong Suh being inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame “I don’t even want to think about when I crossed paths with him in the NFL, he’s just so dominant. He was a Heisman candidate as a defensive player, he’s the most dominant defensive player at least in my recent college history. What I love about Ndamukong is as dominant as he’s been on the field, then he shows philanthropy giving back to the university which you don’t always see. The weight room is named after him because of him and his family’s generous gift. When you play against him in the NFL, he’s just vicious and an amazing competitor. He was in Tampa Bay, he was hard to block. Yet you look at the impact he’s having on young people in terms of saving, in terms of investments, coming back, helping guys with NIL in terms of how to manage their money. His purpose in life is way more than just football. I’m excited to have him back, I think it’ll be great for our players. Hopefully he can come visit with our guys, it’s really a great powerful message for our guys when your players see that the best days of their lives aren’t their recruiting rankings, or not how they were drafted. Each thing should be better than the next. Life after football should be the ultimate. Ndomukong comes in with a beautiful wife and great kids doing amazing things, he’s a tremendous role model.”
On his thoughts on what’s going on in North Carolina “I’ve had two stints of living in North Carolina, obviously I was in Charlotte with Carolina. I have a lot of great friends there and people we love. Our concern, our heart has been there. When Julie and I first left, we lived out in Western North Carolina. Just out past Asheville in Cullowhee, where Western Carolina University is. All those wonderful people in those small towns up through Tennessee and down through Georgia, my heart is certainly with them. As someone who has been part of a few of those kind of disasters, you see the absolute worst, and then sometimes you have a chance to see the absolute best. People picking up and leaving their lives to run and help. It’s sad, it’s unfortunate, and I met so many wonderful people during both my stints in North Carolina. My daughters still go to camp in Western North Carolina. All these people that we care about, we’ve been on the phone, we’ve been concerned. We’ve talked to a few people, some people we haven’t had a chance to talk to yet. We’ve been a little heavy-hearted over all that. Our hope is that the best part of man will step up at these times.”