Week 0 · The Hire Introductory press conference · Skandalaris Football Center
“Nobody has to believe this today. I’d think less of you if you did. Ask me anything.”
“I don’t get to walk in here and ask for trust. Michigan State has asked this fan base for a lot of trust over the last few years and hasn’t always held up its end.”
“Clarity before slogans — I’ll tell you what we’re actually doing, and why, and I’ll try to do it in plain sentences.”
“I’m twenty-eight. My coaching résumé fits on a Post-it. I marched in the band that plays in the stadium I now work in. If you’re sitting there doing the math and it isn’t adding up, that’s a reasonable place to start.”
“My first job isn’t to win a press conference. It’s to make sure those kids don’t get used as props in somebody’s story about whether the young guy can hack it — mine included.”
“A twenty-year-old edge rusher does not care about my birth certificate. He cares whether the thing I’m asking him to do on third down actually gets him to the quarterback, and whether I noticed when it worked.”
“I hope there’s tension. I’d be worried if there weren’t. I did not hire a staff to nod at me.”
“You’re right that it’s a room with two real people in it, and I’m not going to reduce either one of them to make a headline easier to write.”
“Half your listeners are people who’ve bled for this program longer than I’ve been alive and they’re allowed to be angry.”
“It means a lot, and I want to be careful not to turn it into a country song, because Flint deserves better than to be my inspirational backdrop.”
“I love that the student section is already unhinged in July. Don’t lose that. That’s the best thing about being here.”
Week 1 · vs Grambling State Game-week press conference & player availability · Skandalaris Football Center
“We haven’t done anything. There’s no result attached to this program since December. There’s a hire. A hire isn’t a result, a hire is a press conference and then eight months of everybody arguing about it.”
“Competent is just a lot of little stuff going right in a row. And all of it is somebody’s job. Like every piece of it is a person.”
“If I pull a nineteen-year-old in his first start because he missed a comeback route, I’ve taught him something about this place that takes a year to un-teach.”
“Anybody can do that here. He’s not special for doing it, and I don’t want it written up like he did something brave.”
“If our students leave at halftime to go stand in a beer line, they’re idiots. You can print that. Stay for the band.”
“If you need to be mad at somebody, be mad at me. I picked him and I wrote the plan and I’m not hard to find.”
“I don’t know what’s going on in twenty other dudes’ heads and neither does anybody who tells you they do.”
“I got told, I said okay, now that’s what I do.”
“They put me somewhere and the other team has to pick, and honestly after that it doesn’t super matter what I do, because they already picked.”
“Yes sir.”
Week 2 · vs Eastern Michigan Game-week press conference & player availability · Skandalaris Football Center
“Yeah. Okay, so, the short version is we were wrong before the ball was ever snapped on most of it. Not the players. The way I had them lined up.”
“That’s not a kid busting an assignment. That’s me telling eleven people to be right about one thing and then getting them beat by the other thing.”
“Six hundred yards against Grambling State means we can get six hundred yards against Grambling State.”
“Honestly? Nothing. I don’t have anything for you and I’m not going to invent something.”
“I’d like people to be decent to him. I don’t know that I get a vote on what seventy thousand people do.”
“My mom did what she said she was going to do, by the way. Watched me the entire time. She told me afterward that I looked like I hadn’t eaten, and I had eaten.”
“Same graduating class, yeah. She was much better at math than I was.”
“That was the best part of it. It wasn’t the throw. Guys were happy for me and I could tell it was real. I don’t know how else to say it.”
“And then they do it again. That’s the part. They did it again and I knew it was coming and I still wasn’t there in time, because I’m starting so far up that even when I’m right I’m late.”
“Nah. We scored eight times, Dave.”
“I caught that ball. Y’all saw it. Two hands, feet down, I stood up with it.”
“He’s a great teammate.”
Week 3 · at Notre Dame Saturday postgame presser, Tuesday press conference & player availability · Spartan Stadium and the Skandalaris Football Center
“Forty-one to thirteen. I feel great, and I’m saying that first because I want it on the record before Monday happens to me.”
“I have not watched one play of that. Not a frame. Everything in my head right now is what it felt like with a headset on, standing on grass, and that has been wrong before and it’ll be wrong again.”
“Our second half on defense was a different football team than our first half. I don’t know why yet. I know it happened and I know I didn’t do it.”
“I’m standing on the sideline with a call sheet in my hand doing nothing useful at all. That was great. I liked being useless for about eleven minutes.”
“I’m not going to stand here and go through a twenty-year-old’s afternoon twenty minutes after a football game. I won’t do it Tuesday either, so I’d rather just tell you now and save you asking me twice.”
“Is that right? We didn’t punt at all?”
“Right now there are a hundred and something guys down that hallway who just won a football game and I’d like to go be in there with them for a while before I turn into a person who’s thinking about Notre Dame.”
“I said that with a stat sheet lying face down eight inches from my hand, and I’m going to be thinking about that for a while.”
“We ran inside zone three times in the first half straight at the one guy on their defense you should not run inside zone at. Their three-technique. Tayou. He is the best player on that field and I raised my hand and pointed at him three separate times.”
“So the honest version of my day is I was wrong for a quarter, I got out of it by throwing, and then I rebuilt the run around what they were handing me instead of what I wrote down Monday. That’s the job. I’d just like to be better at the first part of it.”
“There was a better call two lines down on my sheet and I went with the one I already liked in my head. That’s the whole thing.”
“I don’t grade players out loud. That’s the whole rule and there isn’t any more of it than that.”
“You should write the tape read. Honestly, you should. It’s your job, it’s a real job, and I would rather you did it well than didn’t do it at all.”
“I made a trade and I lost it, and I lost it inside of about ninety seconds, which is fast even for me.”
“And there is a person on our sideline whose whole job, every snap, is to count our defense out loud. Eleven. Out loud. Every snap of every game.”
“He’s been the best player at our practice since about the second week of camp and I didn’t tell anybody, because why would I tell anybody.”
“And he ran one in, which I did call on purpose, and it was a terrible idea and it worked.”
“If that stadium got quiet it’s because my defense couldn’t get off the field on third down, and that’s my defense and that’s my third down. People paid money to be in there. They’re allowed to have a bad feeling about a bad half.”
“I don’t know. I’ve watched both of them and I don’t know, and I want to be careful not to pretend I do, because I’d like to be believed in October.”
“And I’m not going to sit up here and call anybody a trap game. That’s not a thing we get to say. We’re the team driving there.”
“And Jordan Hall had eleven tackles and an interception and not one person is going to write about it, because of Tre’s, and that’s just how that goes.”
“Nah, I caught all of them. I counted. I know that sounds like a weird thing to do but I counted them Sunday.”
“A guy in my Tuesday class asked me to sign his laptop. I didn’t do it. It’s a laptop.”
“That’s Crishon’s spot. I’m not worried about it. It’s five of us. Somebody eats every week, it just ain’t the same one.”
“Everybody want to hear I ran through a bunch of people. I didn’t really. It was just open.”
“Yeah, the loop. He went around Luka and I was late getting off my guy. That one’s mine.”
“Somebody has it. I think equipment has it? Or Coach Sheridan, one of the two. My mom asked me that same thing Sunday and I didn’t have an answer for her either.”
“He’s not big and he don’t go backwards, he just kind of keeps going. I had him three times before halftime and he came out the back of two of them. That ain’t a call. That’s me not wrapping.”
“Charles is one of my favorite people in that building and he’s a good football player. He watched all of it Monday before anybody said a word to him.”
“I was tired. That’s my honest answer.”
“I’d throw it forty times if they let me. Every quarterback in the country would tell you that. But that’s not what the game called for and I’m not going to sit here and pretend I know better than the sheet. We won by twenty-eight.”
“Nobody got him down. That’s the whole first half, that’s the entire thing.”
“He’s never going to say it. Not about anybody. Which is nice for us. It’s probably annoying for you.”
“Fifty-two on Rice. Everybody keeps saying it was Rice. Okay. When we beat Eastern by twenty-eight everybody said we were rolling. Which is it?”
Quotes from South Bend will be added as the pages are filed.