‘I Haven’t Watched One Play of That’

Hey. All right. Hi.

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.

Before you ask me anything I want to be straight about what I actually have. 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. So when I tell you I don’t know, that’s the real answer. I’m not being coy with you, I just don’t know yet.

Health, nothing. Nobody’s come and found me, and they find me.

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.

That’s everything I’ve got. Go ahead.

Loud. My ears are still going a little.

The third quarter I don’t really know how to describe. There’s a stretch in there where every single time our defense came off the field somebody had done something, and it kept getting louder in there, and 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.

Tuesday I’ll have watched it and I’ll probably be annoyed about eight things. Today I’m not annoyed about anything.

Not really. About four seconds coming off, and I got the top of his helmet, so, no.

He was terrific. I want to be careful because I don’t have his numbers in front of me and I’m not going to pretend I do. What I know is he took what was there about fifteen times in a row without trying to make anything happen, and then on the one third down where there was something down the field he went and took it. Both of those are hard. People think the second one’s the hard one.

Nick Sheridan has had that kid every Wednesday since January. When it comes out like that on a Saturday it came from a Wednesday, and I wasn’t in most of those rooms.

I don’t know yet. I mean that literally, I don’t have it.

What it felt like is that first and second down we were okay and third down we were not okay, and it wasn’t the same problem twice, which usually points back at the guy calling it. So it points at me. I’d rather not invent a reason standing in a tunnel and then have to walk it back Tuesday.

On Bennett, I said it about him all week and I’ll say it again now that he’s gone and done it to me. He is hard to get on the ground. He’s a good football player and we did not get him on the ground.

That’s the loudest I’ve heard it. Two games, so I don’t have a big sample, but yeah, that was the one.

Tre was an outside corner in the spring. We moved him inside in March because I thought he could do about four different jobs and I wanted all four of them. A lot of guys would have been unhappy about that. He never was.

I didn’t see the return. I saw him catch it and then there were about nine people between me and the field. I found out it was a touchdown from the noise. I’ll probably watch that four times tonight.

He was excellent. I don’t know his line and I’m not going to guess at it in here.

The one I’ll remember is the back-shoulder in the first quarter. That throw and that catch only work if two people have done it about a hundred times when nobody was watching them do it, and those two have.

I don’t think he dropped anything all day. Somebody’s going to tell me I’m wrong about that within the hour.

The opening drive was written down. The rest of it, not much. After that I was taking whatever I could get.

And early on what I could not get was the run. We couldn’t run it. I don’t think we ever really ran it, honestly, it felt like every time I called one it was second-and-eight afterward and I’d put us behind. So I threw it, because that was working, and then in the second half we were up three scores and I was handing it off to make the clock go away.

That’s the feel. I’ll go look at it Monday and it might not be right.

The thing I do about it is with me, not with him.

On the forty-four I had him out there by himself with nothing behind him. No help, nobody in the middle of the field, nothing. That’s a coverage I called and I called it for a reason that had nothing to do with him, and then he had to go run it at one o’clock this afternoon.

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. That’s not aimed at you, Deirdre, it’s a real question and you should ask it.

What I’ll give you is that he came off after that touchdown and went straight down the bench to the young corners and told them what he’d just seen out there. Nobody asked him to. I was standing about four feet away.

He’s our kick returner next Saturday and he’s playing corner next Saturday. If you want to ask me about the coverage I called, I’ll stand here as long as you want.

Is that right? We didn’t punt at all?

[He turns the stat sheet over for the first time and reads for a few seconds.]

Huh. Okay. Well, Rhys Dakin warmed up for two hours and did not get to do his job, and I don’t think he’s going to file a complaint about it.

And no penalties. Zero. That’s one in two games. I want to say something better about that than I’m capable of saying right now, because there are people who did that and I want to get their names right and I will absolutely get them wrong standing here in a wet shirt. Ask me Tuesday. I’ll have it.

Oh, come on, man.

[laughter]

I have not had one thought about Notre Dame. Not one, all week, and not in the last twenty minutes either. I’ll have about nine hundred of them by Monday morning and you’ll get most of them Tuesday.

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.

Thanks, everybody. That was a fun one. See you Tuesday.