Sept. 30, 2014
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -
Coach James Franklin
Big Ten Coaches Teleconference
September 30, 2014
Opening statement: We're on a bye week this week. We're excited to get out there on the field today and make some corrections. We'll practice Tuesday and Wednesday. We'll go on the road recruiting Thursday, Friday and Saturday and then get going again on Sunday with our preparation for our next opponent. We're looking forward to it. The bye week came at a great time for us. With our lack of depth at some positions, we're banged up and this is coming at a great time for us. We're looking forward to it and then getting started on our next opponent.
Q: Looking back at Vanderbilt, you were 3-1 after bye weeks. What is the key to maximizing that week and balancing practicing and giving the guys some time away?
Coach Franklin: I think everything is different and everything is magnified here because of the well-documented depth issues that we have and the lack of scholarships and things like that. These things are going to be handled differently here. I've learned from a lot of different people I've worked for and seen, there's a lot of ways to do it. For us, we're pretty committed to the walk-throughs, jog-throughs, mental reps and the footwork. If you do it the right way, there's no doubt that you'd love to go out and go full speed and bang and do those things, but we just can't afford to do that. We're going to try to get our young guys as much work this week as possible to continue with their development. Try to make corrections with our older guys, while still taking some of the banging off of their bodies, so we can get into our next game, being as fresh as we possibly can and be as healthy as we possibly can. That's kind of our priority this week. We have a lot of things to correct and a lot of things to work on; let's do those things and then move on.
Q: Is the plan to give these guys off Thursday, Friday, Saturday and then start your week off on Sunday as you normally do?
Coach Franklin: We'll keep Sunday basically right back to the way it was. Obviously, we'll get more time on Sunday, because we're not spending any time cleaning up our previous game. That will give us more of an opportunity to get more things done on that Sunday. The guys will have off Saturday, so if they want to go home to see high school games and things like that. They have to fulfill all of their academic responsibilities, obviously, but we'll practice Tuesday and Wednesday and give them off Thursday, Friday and Saturday while the coaches are on the road recruiting.
Q: How difficult on the sideline is it to keep track of who is injured? Who on your staff, coaches or medical staff, is responsible for communicating that to you?
Coach Franklin: I think, again, I don't want to talk about the specifics with them because I haven't studied it and that would be appropriate for me to talk about it without being educated on all of the details. I think it's everybody's responsibility here at Penn State. It's the coaches, it's the position coaches. The position coaches are watching their guys. The head coach is watching the guys, but obviously it's hard to watch all 11 guys on the field all at the same time. That's where the coaches, the position coaches, the training staff, the doctors that you have traveling with you, they're all looking at those things and you're constantly growing, constantly evolving, constantly studying best practices and how you can do things differently to learn. We all learn from situations that we've been through and situations that other people have been through. There's no doubt about it. To do it with the numbers we have in our sport, everybody has got to take some responsibility in it.
Q: Did Northwestern's Anthony Walker impress you? Did you have any idea what kind of a player he was going into the game?
Coach Franklin: I thought, overall, I thought you have to give Northwestern credit. They played extremely well. They're well coached. They played hard. They played smart. They really did. You have to give those guys credit. Not only him, but a number of players. We knew it was going to be a challenge. We had been playing a certain way for four weeks and had been able to get by with it by being gutsy and persevering and finding a way at the end of games. You can only do that for so long. One of the things that is interesting is you go into the meeting on Sunday and the players are sitting there waiting to see how you're going to react. We just went in and said, `hey guys, all of us could've done better, myself included. These are the things we need to get corrected moving forward'. I think if if you handle this the right way, it can turn into a positive, because it forces you to deal with some of your issues that you have.
Q: You have a week off and you mentioned some guys are banged up. In your experience, how much can a full week at this point in the season help just getting guys back fresher?
Coach Franklin: Well, where it really helps; when you have guys that are clearly out, it doesn't help a whole lot. The time is always productive. For the guys that have had the nagging injuries, the nagging ankle or bruised shoulder, you just need the time off. That's where it's most valuable and then, obviously, the guys that are playing more reps than they should be but, based on our situation, that's where we're at, allowing those guys to get off of their legs a little bit to get their legs back. Those things are really valuable and probably more valuable for us, in our situation, than most. I think that's where it comes in handy.
Q: Coach, were you surprised with how many problems surfaced against Northwestern? Are they correctable in a short time span or are they more of a long-term project?
Coach Franklin: Really the problems that surfaced are the problems we've been having all year and we've been getting better in them. It's not like a whole lot of things popped up on Saturday that are different than the story we've been writing all year long. It just came to a head and we played an opponent that didn't make a whole lot of mistakes. We've been able to hide some of our deficiencies. I made the comment before that winning minimizes the issues and losing maximizes the issues, but the issues are still there. It's not like a whole lot of things jumped out this Saturday that hadn't been there earlier in the year. We just have to have a better sense of urgency getting them fixed. Some of them, you aren't going to get fixed overnight. One of the things, to me, is a pretty good example of things that we're going through is we have one scholarship offensive tackle in the senior, junior and sophomore classes. If you look at our scholarship board, we only have one offensive tackle, on scholarship, in three classes. So you have a senior and freshmen, that's it. Some of these problems, you won't solve in a week. I think our guys are doing awesome. They're playing hard and they're great kids, but it is what it is in some of these situations.
Q: At Vanderbilt, your record after the bye was dramatically different than your record before the bye. Is there any thing that you can apply from the situation there to the situation now?
Coach Franklin: Yeah, I think so. I think you guys have heard me say before, I think there are some similarities in what we've been through in the past and what we're facing here. Experience counts and I think the way you handle these bye weeks is really important. I've worked for a lot of different coaches that have handled them in different ways. What we're trying to do is learn from all those past experiences, but also do what's best for Penn State now. One of the big things is a lot of times in normal weeks and preparation, you're rushing to get the stuff corrected from the week before. You're rushing to get the new gameplan installed. You're rushing to work on fundamentals and techniques that you need. What happens is you probably don't do a good enough job in any of those areas. The bye week allows you to do that, especially when you're a new staff and trying to install new things. Once you've been here for a couple years and you have years of muscle memory built up, in terms of techniques, fundamentals, plays and those things, then it's probably not as magnified like it is right now. We're excited about this bye week, the timing of when it comes and hopefully it puts us in a position to play the way we're capable of playing against our next opponent.