If you have been following closely, every Tuesday Ohio State head coach Jim Tressel meets with the media at the Jack Nicklaus Museum to talk about the Buckeyes’ last game and OSU’s upcoming opponent.
Reporters gather far and wide for the luncheon to dine on the finest meats and cheeses the land has to offer, and later the media members get to ask Coach Tressel questions.
REPORTER: Coach, there’s talk of Todd Boeckman becoming a Heisman candidate; do you think he’s playing at a Heisman level and what do you think he would need to do to get a chance to go to New York?
COACH TRESSEL: Who began that talk, you, Raj?
REPORTER: No, it was on College Gameday.
COACH TRESSEL: Oh, it was? Then it must be exact. You know, I think those kinds of things get talked about more and more as the season goes on. And what I like about some of those national awards recently is people start talking about the guys who are on teams who are doing well. And so talk about that type of thing in Todd’s case or any of our guys’ case could stop if we don’t play well and escalate if we do, but again, we can’t think too much about it and I think he’s done an excellent job. I thought he played a good football game when we really needed it on the road in a tough environment and needed him to come through. I think he was — I forget what his percentage was on third down, but it was excellent when we needed him to step up and move the chains and those kinds of things, but that was the first I’ve heard that discussion, so probably wasn’t prepared to answer it.
REPORTER: Coach, in terms of Todd, I think back to the spring and the preseason and you never really submitted him and said, this is our guys, until like 10 days before the first game. In some regards, are you surprised? Was this a case of, I’ve got to see him do this in live action to know that he is the solid number-one guy or are you surprised he’s taken the ball and run with it and number three in the country in passing efficiency and all this?
COACH TRESSEL: I’m not surprised he’s taken the ball and run with it because the way he prepares and he’s a talented kid. And, yes, we did need to see it. I think sometimes when you’re knighted before you’re deserving it works against you. I think Todd, not unlike the quarterback at Wisconsin, had to go and earn and emerge as the guy. I think that’s most respected by your teammates. Sometimes the old axiom, some guys have to prove they can’t, some guys have to prove they can, I think you gain the greatest amount of confidence from your teammates when you’re one of the guys that has to prove he can.
Todd has proven thus far that he can and needs to continue to prove it. He’ll go to work, he’ll bring his lunch bucket today and go to work and do all the things that he’s got to do to try to get better and hopefully he’ll keep gaining the confidence of his teammates.
REPORTER: Do you think the offensive line needs to step up this week? Because Todd looks like he took the game in slow motion.
COACH TRESSEL: I thought the offensive line did an excellent job. Penn State probably blitzed a little bit more than we anticipated. I thought our guys, amidst the difficulty of communicating, picked up the one time we didn’t make the right call and got sacked and so forth, but I thought the offensive line, from a communication standpoint, did an excellent job. Those guys up front for Penn State are very good. The two guys in the middle, really the three that rotated in there were big guys and very powerful guys. The edge guys had a lot of quickness and I thought our guys did a good job pass pro and run blocking equally as well. If they’ll keep growing as a unit, like anything else, you have to work together for a while to really get on all cylinders and now they’re going to have a little bit different challenge this week with the great quickness and the extreme pressure and the blitzing with nobody deep. Most of Penn State’s blitzes were what we call zone blitzes. Wisconsin brings a lot more a little bit quicker, and so they’ll have a heck of a challenge this week.
REPORTER: Can you talk a little bit about the versatility of the offense we’ve been seeing lately? Todd’s throwing short, the offensive is going long to Robo (Robiskie) and he seems to be using all the weapons on the field.
COACH TRESSEL: We’ve been taking notes of everything every one’s been suggesting. Todd’s done a good job of going to who’s open. There were times that he threw to the tight end that that wasn’t the first look. There were times he went deep and that wasn’t necessarily the first look or wasn’t what we had in mind when the play was called, but here, that’s the coverage that was shown. So we have to be balanced. We talk about it all the time and we have to be able to throw to any receiver. We can’t have them say, hey, if you cover Number 80, you have him stopped or whatever, so hopefully we’ll keep getting better at that.
REPORTER: Wisconsin has always been a kind of a nemesis for this program the last two decades really, what is it, aside from them being a good team that makes them difficult to play, and I wonder, is it the same system that Barry had now for that team?
COACH TRESSEL: I think you hit it on the head, you answered your own question, they’re a good team. A good team is a nemesis. It’s tough to beat good teams. Their system is very similar. I think Bret’s done a good job. He took over for a guy that did an extraordinary job and you get into those decisions that, do we just carry on the way it’s been or do we do some of the things that perhaps you’ve grown to believe in, and I think he’s done a nice job of keeping the identity of what Wisconsin is all about.
They’re all about physical football. They’re all about taking care of the tempo of the game with your offense and the time of possession and having excellent special teams and very physical pressure defense, a lot like what we believe in, but yet he’s added some wrinkles of things that you can see are probably some of the things that he believes in.
I think Coach Chryst, their offensive coordinator, has brought excellent creativity to what they do. I like the way they feature what their guys can do, they find ways to get an eye on the ball, hand the ball off to the big guy and let them pound you, but the reason they’re hard is because they’re good.
REPORTER: They’ve beaten your teams three out of four, do you take that personally?
COACH TRESSEL: Do I take it personally?
REPORTER: Do you sense that they, for want of a better word, do they have your number?
COACH TRESSEL: I don’t know, we’ll find out Saturday.
REPORTER: Does it put you in a difficult situation, a situation when you have a guy whose brother played here and then he is being recruited, like Shane Carter’s situation, is that difficult when you’re a Coach and you’re selecting and you always have a ton of guys who want to play here, with his brother’s history here, was that a difficult situation for you?
COACH TRESSEL: You know, you always try to be as objective as you can, but then sometimes some subjectivity comes in and you know the blood lines and all those kinds of things, but you still have to make decisions, as you say, based on needs and so forth, and sometimes you are right and sometimes you are wrong, that’s the way recruiting is, and you never know until the end of the day how that goes.
REPORTER: Did Chryst campaign with you personally?
COACH TRESSEL: No.
REPORTER: How important is P. J. Hill to them and how do they utilize him?
COACH TRESSEL: I think he sets the tempo. He gives them the identity. They’ve had a history of having those physical backs. He’s carried that torch forward and I think he’s a good receiver as well, but he’s the guy that if you allow him to take the game over, you’ve got a problem.
REPORTER: I know you don’t like to use revenge as a motivator, but you clearly a lot of times use video clips as reminders of past games.
COACH TRESSEL: Sure.
REPORTER: How much of a role does that play, Xs and Os are here, how much of a role does emotional preparation play in getting a team ready?
COACH TRESSEL: I think football is an emotional game and probably the emotion that’s most important is the one of focusing on what needs to be done. I don’t know that the emotion of things outside of what needs to be done add as much or distract from what you’re doing. You’ve got to know the task at hand and you’ve got to be emotionally in that moment to do that, and sometimes there are things that bring you into that moment and I’m sure our guys had a little easier job visualizing Happy Valley in ‘07 than they did in ‘05. We’d never been in that moment. Nobody had been in that — we’d been there, but not in the atmosphere that was created there, the night games and the whiteouts and all that, I think we drew some energy from that, because, man, that was fun the last time, we didn’t do as well as we should have, but that was fun. If you can just do the things you need to do to be successful, we could have fun and get a win as well. So I think emotions are huge as long as it makes sure that you have the proper focus.
REPORTER: Do you think there’s any bad blood between the two? Before you got here, they danced on the O, Ohio State danced on the W, Brooks Bollinger said, this is our home kind of thing maybe after one of the wins.
COACH TRESSEL: These guys were in grade school. There’s always teams that you know they’re good, and you’re going to get emotionally ready to play. Wisconsin is one of those. They’re a good football team. As long as our guys have been alive, they’ve known Wisconsin is a good football team. But bad blood? No, I don’t. I’m not sure what that does for you other than distract you.
REPORTER: We’ve talked a lot about Todd’s ability to throw the deep ball, you talked about that in preseason how he had that knack; does he work on that in practice, or does a quarterback just have that touch and something he doesn’t have to constantly be throwing that ball to keep it?
COACH TRESSEL: We’ve worked on that, Joe works on that all the way through spring and preseason, and our amount of individual time is less once you get into the season and game planning and so forth, but we certainly work on it. I think there is a little touch that some have and some guys you can work with forever and they don’t seem to develop that touch, but Todd, I think, understands what we want done with the deep ball, and has a little natural knack for that touch.
REPORTER: All the things you do in offense, if you can pound the ball with the running game and then throw it up top, is that always going to be difficult to stop for a defense if you have those two things going?
COACH TRESSEL: Well, if you’re able to run the ball, that necessitates bringing more people down to stop that, which leaves DBs alone more. Now, if your receivers can get open, it’s a good thing. If their DBs can cover you. Just like our team, we’re typically more hats in the box than are conventional or whatever, so we put a lot of onus on our DBs to be able to handle that and to get to the guy before he can just sit and throw nice and easy, but certainly, if you can throw deep and you can run, that’s a good start.
REPORTER: Jim, there was a lot of frustration verbalized after the win over Michigan State and not any of that that I heard after the Penn State win and maybe a sense of satisfaction that settled in. Do you sense any sense of satisfaction and would you rather have it the other way? Would you rather have them a little angry with the way they’re playing?
COACH TRESSEL: Well, you don’t want complacency to creep into anything. I don’t know that I sensed that as we went to work Sunday. I think the fact that it’s Wisconsin coming in here and we know how good they are, that can nip any complacency and if you do have some, you’ll probably get it knocked out of you in the first three minutes, but I didn’t sense — I sensed the frustration a week ago really focused on those two plays. I don’t know that it was focused on, hey, we’re no good, it’s that we can’t let those kind of plays happen and that’s true. And if we’re not disappointed when those happen, we’re dead.
REPORTER: Jim, you mentioned about this being November, how confident are you that this group is prepared to handle this three-game stretch run?
COACH TRESSEL: How confident? I have a lot of confidence in these guys’ preparation. As I said all along, I thought we are very capable physically and now it’s up to us to roll our sleeves up and do the work to prepare and then the moment that we’re told to do it, which this week happens to be 12:00 noon, be ready to go that day, but I have a lot of confidence in this group. They work hard and I really believe, as I’ve said many times, that they would like to be good, and we have a chance to see if we can prove that.
REPORTER: Jim, you mentioned complacency a couple minutes ago, but…
COACH TRESSEL: He did, but…
REPORTER: It was brought up to you, anyway. Did last year’s team get complacent before the bowl game?
COACH TRESSEL: I think if you really analyzed it and gave a lie detector to every one of us, we might have said, you know what, we might not have been as focused on the task at hand every second as we could have been. Now, again, I never want to detract from what your opponent does. Florida did a good job. So the way sport is, is it’s not a one-way deal. We did not do as well as we could do. That typically to me is a little bit of a lack of focus on the moment, which I think, why wouldn’t you be focused on the moment. One argument could be maybe you were a little complacent.
REPORTER: Do you think that both the players and perhaps coaching staff learned something from last year which could help you this year?
COACH TRESSEL: You would hope absolutely.
REPORTER: Jim, this game, a game of this magnitude on the Big Ten Network, there are going to be some fans that are grumpy about that, unhappy, I wonder, do you empathize with that, do you understand the backlash that might come from that?
COACH TRESSEL: Do I wish the Big Ten Network were on everyone’s TV? Absolutely. Do I understand exactly why it is or it isn’t? No. I haven’t really done my homework as to the whys and the wherefores, so, yeah, I empathize because I would want everyone in the world to see us play, but I guess the way I look at it is the situation in my case, it’s at 12:00 noon on Saturday and it’s on the Big Ten Network. Now, you better go to work. I guess if I don’t have the Big Ten network, I go to my friend’s house that does or — I’m not sure. I empathize with it, but I don’t know what to do. There’s nothing I can do about that. I’m hoping one day that that’s not the case.
REPORTER: Just to kind of change focus just for a moment, we’re reading a lot now, hear a lot of information about possibly the Big Ten expanding another team and a possible invite going out to West Virginia, have you heard anything along those lines? And the second part is, Fox Sports is projecting at this point a BCS Championship with West Virginia, any thoughts on that?
COACH TRESSEL: Have not heard either thing, to be honest with you.
REPORTER: Fox Sports.
COACH TRESSEL: Fox Sports is ahead. The discussion I heard at the Big Ten meetings was that they’re always under consideration for expansion and that first and foremost, though, it had to be an academic match.
REPORTER: We’ve heard that they’re not part of the academic whatever it is the Big Ten has, they’re not in that arena, but that may not be a precluding fact from them getting invited. That’s what we’ve been hearing.
COACH TRESSEL: You know what? I don’t know the answer to that.
REPORTER: Coach, I’ve asked a lot of young players how they’ve picked up their game and they’ve said team bonding and extra practices, extra drills. How would you rate their work ethic in the off season?
COACH TRESSEL: A lot of what people were concerned about was what would the leadership be of this team because we had so few seniors and that type of thing and that was a concern because I’ve always believed you’ve got to have a strong corps of seniors. The only thing I thought was going to overcome that was the fact that we have like 30 juniors and when you have that many guys that have that much experience as we have, maybe you’ll do the thing we need to do. I think our guys have done that. We’ve trained extra. They’ve done a lot of work on their own in the summer and done about what you need to do without overdoing it and without getting burned out on it or whatever yet still had plenty of fun and enjoyed being a college student and all the rest. I would certainly grade that part of our guys’ performance, their preparation, as being very good.
REPORTER: Unlike 2002, you haven’t had that heart-stopping moment…
COACH TRESSEL: Weren’t you at the Michigan State game when the third fumble went down? You must have missed that. You must have gone and gotten a hot dog back there, man!
REPORTER: I guess what I’m saying is you haven’t had that last-second or fourth-quarter…
COACH TRESSEL: On-side kick two games in a row. No, we haven’t had a game that was decided on the last play.
REPORTER: Yeah. I guess what I’m saying is, do you think if you’d gotten involved in a late fourth-quarter game over the next three that the team would be confident?
COACH TRESSEL: I think they’ve trained hard physically and would meet the challenge physically. You never know until you’re put into those situations how you’re going to handle it when you’re behind and we got behind the other night and I thought our guys just went to work. I didn’t see any panic or, oh, my gosh, they’re going to take over, but again, with three minutes to go and we’re behind, haven’t lived through that one yet and we’ll see how we do.
REPORTER: Could you evaluate the way Kirk Barton has played from the beginning of the year to right now?
COACH TRESSEL: I think Kirk, the question was brought up earlier about our preparation, I think Kirk’s preparation has been extraordinary. The amount of time he’s spent working and preparing, he was going to have an extraordinary senior year. He was set on it. He knew he was one of the few true seniors back who had significant playing opportunity, and his preparation has been tremendous. He’s a focused guy. I mean, sometimes I worry that it means too much to him and that because it’s huge to Kirk, to not only him do his part, but for this group to do well, and I’ve been very pleased with what he’s contributed.
REPORTER: Have you tweaked and would you speak a little bit about the complexity of the Buckeye leaves and that system that you have?
COACH TRESSEL: We’ve only tweaked it once when we got here. I don’t really know what it was prior to that. We had a helmet award-type thing that we’ve been happy before that we wanted to reflect group achievement. The only way, I’d say 95% of the way is to get a helmet sticker, a Buckeye leaf, here is to do something as part of a group, whether it’s something the team did, the punt unit it, something the offense, the defense, there’s an occasional way to get one of your own. If you grade a whole game of winning performance, you get a helmet award. But really outside of that, we wanted internally for that to reflect that that’s what’s important, that’s how you get decorated, that’s how people get decorated on their uniform, what they do for their country or what they do for their corps or that type of thing. So that’s what we wanted it to be all about and we really haven’t tweaked it since we set the criteria.
REPORTER: What have you been most surprised of through nine games, maybe you didn’t know if you had or not that you now feel comfortable with?
COACH TRESSEL: What have we been most surprised about? Nothing jumps — I guess a guy like Cameron Heyward as a true freshman in the trenches, that’s unusual. Not that we didn’t think he was very, very good and all that type of thing, but I guess that’s one that jumps up at me, but I suppose I could look up and down the depth chart and that type of thing, but that’s the first one that pops up.
REPORTER: Troy led the Big Ten last year in passing efficiency, Todd’s leading it this year, what do you make of that stat? I think most people probably have no idea how that’s formulated, you obviously have your own recruiting of quarterbacks, but what can be drawn on passing efficiency?
COACH TRESSEL: Well, passing efficiency is really the biggest factors in passing efficiency are yards per attempt because lots of people can throw a little swing pass for a minus two or whatever, so it’s not necessarily as focused on completion percentage, although that does have a part, but it’s yards per attempt have a huge impact. The touchdown/interception ratio has a huge impact. And really, if you think about it, that’s what’s most important. It’s not based on how many attempts you have necessarily. It’s not based on how many completions really. It’s based upon what did your passes do? Did they gain yards? Did they gain touchdowns? Did they stay away from the other guys’ arms? And what do we make of that? We make of that that that’s what we believe is important, those areas. And I think when people come up with efficiency ratings, they’re usually based upon good, sound thinking, just like our grades. When we grade our people, they get a certain amount of weight for getting their job done, and if they happen to have a missed assignment, it has like triple weight, because it has that kind of impact. So in the mathematical way we figure it out, it has the impact that affects the game. So you try to have sound thinking in the way that you evaluate and I that that passing efficiency has pretty sound thinking.
REPORTER: You guys go from a two tight formation with an H guy, five wide, shotgun, I’m just wondering, how much pressure does that put on your quarterback to be able to do all those things? Do you marvel a little bit how Todd’s been able to pick up on that?
COACH TRESSEL: Well, if he were a first year, first-year guy, I’d really be marveled. But Todd’s paid attention. But Todd’s been here and run all those as a scout teamer, plus run every team’s scout team in the offense, for every year there as a scout teamer and has run ours for quite some time. What I like about Todd is he knows why we’re doing what we’re doing. It’s that St. Henry education Jim Lachey keeps reminding me. He understands. He’s a guy that you can make adjustments with and say, hey, here’s what they’re doing to this formation, we want to go to that and Jim Bollman’s been very comfortable with check packages and those kinds of things. We didn’t probably highlight those quite as much last week because of the communication factor, but he has a handle — but again, I’ve said this a lot in the last three weeks, kids these days have listened to so much football and heard so much analysis and seen so much videotape with their high school coaches and have seen all the people talk about things, whether it be talk radio or read about it or see it on TV during the broadcast, they know a lot more football. They really do. They understand it. And Todd was paying attention when he was sitting on the couch watching TV, I think.
REPORTER: I know you always say that the offense will do what the defense gives you. I’m wondering how much what the opposing offense does weighs in your play calling because Wisconsin dominates time of possession and I wonder if that makes you a little less likely to go to a quick strike knowing you might be giving up the ball for the next seven minutes after that.
COACH TRESSEL: It’s interesting, I’ve never gotten too involved in saying, oh, my gosh, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to stop these guys, we better be able to score a lot, fortunately because I’ve been here and we’ve had great defense. But I think it makes every one of our possessions even more important, because they have shown the ability, against anybody, to possess the ball and to grind the clock and all of a sudden, you’re looking around and where did the game go.
So I don’t know how we could emphasize any more how crucial every play is, but if we can find a way to do that, we’re going to do that, because we need to not allow Wisconsin to take over the tempo of the game with their offense possessing the balm and that’s going to be critical. Thanks so much.
