Transcript: K-State's coordinators on TCU week
Read full transcripts of Kansas State coordinators Courtney Messingham and Scottie Hazelton from Thursday's press conference.
COURTNEY MESSINGHAM, OFFENSIVE COORDINATOR
On Malik Knowles’ status for Saturday…
“From what I understand, the doctors will basically decide on game day. Right now, we’re not anticipating (having him), but obviously if he plays, I’d be fired up about it.”
On creating deep threats through schemes…
“That’s part of the deal that you have to do. You have to figure out the best way to get some shots. Unfortunately right now, we haven’t had a lot of big plays, and we need to be able to move the chains, but we also need to get chunks of yards. Right now, we’re not doing very well at that.”
On the progress of wide receiver Phillip Brooks…
“I think he’s playing with a lot more confidence. I think he feels like he can make plays and has shown that he is a guy that can. The hard part for him is that he’s not that long-bodied guy that you’re going to stretch the field with. Not that he can’t, because he can really, really run, but he’s still not that big target.”
On the running game without running back Jordon Brown…
“That’s one of the harder things. When you take Jordon out of the mix and Malik (Knowles) out of the mix, now all of a sudden the run game starts getting squeezed because we don’t have some of the ability to stretch the field and/or force someone to cover the back. Now, I feel good about what our O-line is doing and what the tight ends are doing. James (Gilbert) is still a violent runner and will do a nice job for us, but we have to get it going up front a little bit.”
On offensive line consistency…
“I think all of our guys really understand executing. To execute, it means every down. If it was the tight ends, receivers, the tailbacks themselves or the O-line, I think all of us understand that, for us to be successful, every play we have to get our job done. I think all of them understand that.”
On comfort level with Chris Herron at wide receiver…
“We have to become more and more comfortable because he is a guy with what people would say really good quick twitch. He’s a guy that can really create his own space. The hard part is he’s a true freshman. Some guys pick it up really, really fast. He’s not been slow at picking it up, it’s just that it’s all so foreign to him, all so brand new, being a receiver when he really came in as a quarterback.”
On wide receiver Keenan Garber’s improvement…
“The same thing for him from the standpoint of now it’s Big 12 football. You go out there with our corners, who I think are really good players and you say, ‘OK, there are times when does great things and you go, ‘Wow.’’’ Then, there are other times when they lock him down and you say, ‘He’s a true freshman.’ It wasn’t that long ago where he, obviously, playing in a high school setting and now he’s playing out there in a Big 12 setting.”
On what it will take to run well against TCU’s defense…
“I think it’ll go back to blocking the guy in front of us. ‘My individual blocks, do I take care of my job?’ Because I don’t think they are going to do a whole bunch of things that will ‘fool’ us, but they are very, very good at doing their job over and over again. It’s obviously a tribute to who they are as a defense over the last 15, 20 years that Gary (Patterson) has been there. They really understand their job and they do their job well.”
On TCU’s defensive schemes compared to Baylor, Oklahoma State...
“Quite a bit different. They’re almost all four down. What is similar is their safeties are going to be in the run game. They’re going to put their corners somewhat out on an island and play man-to-man technique, and then let their safeties be run-player fit guys also.”
On best deep threat after Malik Knowles…
“Crazy enough, just because of understanding how to get open and how to play, probably Dalton (Schoen). Part of it is probably also that trust factor that Skylar (Thompson) has.”
On TCU linebacker Garret Wallow…
“I don’t know if any of their guys we would say, ‘Wow, we have to run specifically away from.’ But I do think that a number of their guys, because they are so athletic, none of them are huge. They’re not linebackers like we’ve maybe seen the last three or four weeks where you’d say there’s a 240-pound (linebacker), there’s another 240-pound linebacker, two or three of those guys. They get off blocks really, really well, and they run. Their D-line, very similar. They are not guys you’d say are a bunch of 330-pounders, but they’re athletic, they’re quick and they get off blocks.”
On other teams’ success against TCU defense…
“A couple things. Some of the (teams) were going in what people would call ‘tempo,’ going fast, up-tempo stuff. Then, SMU’s really a system and style that is go fast but also throw the ball and live and die a little bit by the throwing game. I think that there’s a little bit you can take from all the teams they’ve played that, hopefully, we can use. The hard part, though, is you don’t want to be ‘grab bagging,’ be all over the place. We still want to be true to who we want to be. We need to be able to run the football.”
On if running back Joe Ervin will continue taking on a larger role…
“Yes, yes. He needs to and he will. I anticipate him playing more and more reps as the season continues.”
On the main emphasis on the recruiting trail lately…
“We’re fortunate that we have a number of young men committed. Probably the main emphasis is making sure those guys are still in with who we are and believe in us. Then, it’s going out and trying to evaluate new guys, trying to get guys who we’ve already evaluated excited about who we are and then finding new guys.”
On focusing on certain positions in recruiting…
“Right now, you would say we’re recruiting all positions. I don’t think we’re at a point yet in our program at this point where you’d say, ‘We’re only looking for specifically this guy or specifically that guy.’ We need to keep trying to find the best players we can find.”
On if general reception with recruits has changed since season started…
“Not really. It’s amazing. I think we’ve done a really nice job of identifying guys who fit who we are. I think they understand what we’re going to be and what we want to be. All the phone conversations I’ve had have been extremely positive, and I feel great with them.”
SCOTTIE HAZELTON, DEFENSIVE COORDINATOR
On TCU quarterback Max Duggan...
“He’s a young guy who understands their package. He’s done a really good job with it since he came in. He was playing even early in the season. They’ve been playing two guys the whole time. One is a little bit more of a runner. He seems to carry the ball a little bit more. I think he’s done a good job since he’s been in there.”
On if it’s tough to work on tackling in practice due to NCAA restrictions...
“I think you can work on tackling without tackling all the time. You can work on different areas of it. ‘Ok, hey, our leverage is bad.’ ‘Why is our leverage bad?’ ‘Well, I took my drop and my eyes don’t get on course and I have bad leverage there. How can I scrape and get tight off a block? How can I do this?’ Or even breaking down the fundamentals? Or ‘It’s just me and you, Ok. I’m going to go around your thighs and wrap and squeeze.’ Those kind of things. You can do some of that stuff. We worked on those fundamentals, but also, yes, very much so we’ve tackled quite a bit when we’ve had a chance to.”
On game planning for when TCU quarterback Alex Delton does play...
“We have it in. It’s a deal where, since he’s played quite a bit, you kind of have to take that into account, especially the last couple of weeks they’ve had some packages for him. You know he’s going to play at some point. How much, who knows? That’s their question. We just kind of play who comes in. You have your package for a running quarterback and a non-running quarterback. How much we’re going to see them, we’ll see.”
On if it benefits the defense knowing Alex Delton’s skill sets...
“I think it can go both ways. You could argue and say that he knows our personnel very well too. So, if I’m reading a defensive end and I think I can outrun that guy because I’ve seen him in practice 75 times do the same thing, it might benefit him at the same time. It goes both ways. He knows us, and our guys know him. So I think it helps both sides.”
On who is running as quarterback in scout team this week...
“Right now we’re using Ryan Henington. He’s a guy that can run around a little bit. He has a little bit of juice to him. So, he’s been doing a good job for us.”
On what teams have done to have success against TCU and what TCU has done to have success...
“I think it’s really on the quarterback stuff. People who actually get after that guy a little bit - whoever it is, it doesn’t matter - they’re not comfortable standing in there. If they have to stand in there a little bit. Listen, the receivers are good, man. They have some speed. They have speed all over the field, and their backs are good. So, their personnel isn’t bad around. It’s the trigger man. If you can disrupt that guy, maybe his timing is a little off, or he misses a ball. There’s a guy open and it just ends up being a long foul ball, and you’re like, ‘Oh, we lived through that one.’ There’s a lot of that going on. So, I’m sure they’re working on their timing and all those kind of things. Listen, he’s always the guy you have to get after. I don’t care if he’s a dude that’s played 800 games and he’s going to go to the NFL and be a first-round draft pick or if it’s going to be a guy who’s just starting up. You generally can disrupt a guy who is a little bit younger and hasn’t had that experience. So, hopefully we can get that done.”
On what TCU running back Darius Anderson does to give defenses trouble...
“He’s a hard runner, man. He’s a guy that has really good vision. He can enter a gap and then, ‘Ok, I see something and I can slide and bounce to it and hit it.’ If you tackle him high, if you get too high on him, it gives you issues because he’s strong. I know he doesn’t look huge in stature, but he’s a strong guy that runs. If you get high, he’s going to drag you for a few (yards). If you don’t wrap him up, if you try to blast him, he has good enough balance where he’s just going to keep going. We’ve seen that enough on tape and we show as many of those clips as we can because we’ve had those issues ourselves.”
On what the defense needed to do better against Baylor...
“I think it just goes down to big plays again. You look at everything, just the amount of explosives we’re giving up right now. Those are things that we look at as a staff, and say, ‘Ok, what are the things that are really hurting us?’ ‘Well, explosives.’ ‘Ok, why are those happening?’ ‘Well, there’s some things where we’re still learning the defense.’ Like we talked about a first - leverage. Well, we’re too wide in the gap and someone else is filling another gap, and we’re close so I’m going to go make another play. Then, we knock a guy off and there you go - the ball spits for 35 (yards). You have tackling issues. ‘Yes, he’s next to the sideline so I can knock him out of bounds, but I don’t wrap and squeeze and the guy spins off and goes.’ Those big plays are what’s hurting us, and it’s not so much the big plays. The ones that you say, ‘Listen, they threw a fade to (No.) 5.’ Ok, that’s going to happen. A guy is going to get beat one-on-one every once in a while. Those aren’t the ones that you worry about. It’s the ones that you’re like, ‘Ok, here’s a play where we had two guys at the point of attack, and through something as fundamental as just having great leverage on a guy and understanding what angle I tackle him at and knock a different guy off.’ Now, we went from having two guys there to having none and our free safety has to make (the tackle) for a big gain. That’s not exactly what you want. Those are the plays we need to stop having. The explosives that it’s, ‘Hey, listen, they ran a route off a scramble and a guy leaked through,’ Ok. Those are going to happen in a game. Those are acceptable things. That happened a little too much in the Baylor game with our rush not being together, which allowed the quarterback to extend plays. They got a few too many explosives there. Just those things that we talked about - we’re still learning the defense and we’re in a spot where we say, ‘Listen, we need to start maturing in the defense and get to Football 201 where we can start to make those plays.’ Then no one notices them. He knocks it down and it’s a two-yard gain. ‘Ok, great, everyone’s happy.’ We just need to keep working on those things, and we’ve tried to this past two weeks.”
On keeping enthusiasm after two losses and bye week…
“This is what we do. They’re football players and we’re football coaches. I don’t know that you can say, ‘OK, is a team ever going to lose two games again? Probably.’ There are a lot of teams out there with a worse record than 3-2. If we were 0-5, you would say, ‘OK, it might be hard,’ but I think it’s a deal where you say, ‘There’s some good things we’ve done.’ There are some things you look at and say, ‘All these plays are good plays. We have these handful of plays that are really bad plays. So, if we can clean these up, it’s not that far away.’ But it’s also a deal where you can say, ‘On these really good plays, (the mistake) happened here, too, just no one noticed because someone else made a play.’ You can point out those things. The guys do learn. Whether it’s right or wrong, people learn better from losing. It’s a proven fact and it’s true within our team, too. They’re more attuned to it. You tell them the same exact thing. It’s like coaching your kid sometimes. You can tell your kid something and all of a sudden they go out and see a coach and he tells them something and then they do it. It’s the same thing that happens with us. You tell them after a win and they’re, like, ‘Yeah, yeah. We won.’ You do it after a loss and they pay attention to it a little more. Hopefully it’s sinking through.”
On defensive mistakes in last two games...
“There are some things we got away with in the first few games, too. But the same mistakes, you can coach off of, ‘Hey, we made this mistake here. Let’s work on that,’ and you can get some guys fixed and some guys are, like, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ and then they might make the same mistake. When it happens to you in a loss, guys are a little more tuned in. Then, when you’re doing it in an individual (drill), they take better care of it to really accelerate and try to work on that fact. Is it going to be a deal where our guys know this defense overnight and have a sweet transition? I sure hope so. I hope they just mature and it’s like they’re in their third year in the program. But is that going to happen? I think we’re still going to have some growing pains. Be realistic about it, but hopefully we got some of the issues cleaned up and we can play better.”
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