Tressel Talk – Week 4
Right: Coach Tressel in front of the firing, er, I mean media squad.
Courtesy of ohiostatebuckeyes.com
Well, it’s that time of the week (three days late due to the power outages) where Ohio State head coach Jim Tressel addresses the media at his press conference which is normally held at the the Jack Nicklaus Museum, but was moved to the Waffle House on Rome-Hilliard Rd. after last Saturday’s performance.
Look, I love Jimmy T. just like most Buckeye fans do, and he’s the father I never had, even though that given our ages that’s not quite possible unless he was sexually active early in high school. Be that as it may, there needs to be some changes.
Instead of letting Coach Tressel rehash the debacle in southern California, let’s skipped ahead to where he talks about Troy in his opening statements:
Troy has got excellent speed. They thrashed Middle Tennessee pretty good, and we all know what Middle Tennessee has done the last couple weeks, they beat Maryland and ended up on the half yard line or something and should have or could have or whatever beat Kentucky, and Troy had their way with them. And so we know Troy is an excellent football team. Great speed. Great tradition. Their whole personality is made up on the fact that 10 years ago they wanted to be Division I and they said their road to Division I is to go to every great stadium in America and introduce themselves to that team, they’ve been to Nebraska, LSU, Missouri, Florida State, Mississippi State, South Carolina, on and on and on. That’s the way they’re building their program, and they’ve been wanting to schedule us for a couple years and we finally found a spot to get them in and they can’t wait to stake claim to visiting a Big Ten stadium and letting people know who they are. So it will be a great challenge for our guys, one that we’re very capable of confronting and I’m anxious to get out on the practice field and go from there.”
As soon as Coach Tressel takes questions from the media, the first one is about quarterback Todd Boeckman and whether or not he’s has lost any confidence in him or was his performance based on poor line play?
You know, I think, like I told the team when we met on Sunday, or Monday, I guess it was, what we have to work on is what we are doing in the game of football that we need to do better. No one has changed any thinking about who they are. Now, is it disappointing that we had a couple turnovers? Absolutely. Is that a problem? Yes. Do I think he’s capable of not having those turnovers and doing what we need to do? Yes. Are some of those things in part because we weren’t as good as we could have been on the offensive line? Yes. We weren’t as good as we could have been out wide? Yes. And everything in between.”
Now on to the $64,000 question about who will be the starting quarterback and how many snaps each will get vs. Troy and whether or not they would alternate in the middle of drives:
I liked how it worked when we did things well. On the plays when we didn’t, I wish we would have done something else, but I don’t think it was a bad thing. You know, I don’t know how many plays like in the long drive we had, I don’t know how many of the plays Todd was in or how many Terrelle was in or that kind of thing:as we got done with the Tuesday game plan, what we’re going to work on on Tuesday, you divide it up into various situational things and so forth, at the end of the evening, getting it done, I asked the question, how should we go about practicing our quarterbacks and how do you envision how much of the time each is going to play throwing it out to the offensive staff. And everyone likes to have an opinion, and you craft your own opinion by the logic of others, and so with the things that we’re doing today, we came to the consensus that Terrelle was going to do about 65% of them and Todd was going to do about 35% of them in part because so many of them Todd has done so many times already and we know what he can do. That’s certainly affected by what Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday looks like and that’s certainly affected by what Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday looks like.”
Though I think Terrelle Pryor gives Ohio State a better chance to win and with the Buckeyes having two very winnable games coming up he should start and get most of the snaps, but coach Tressel was asked if both will spilt time 50/50:
We said if we had a game last night (Monday) with what we were planning to do, that we envisioned that it would be 50/50, but it will be affected by what we do in practice, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and obviously what occurs during the course of the game.”
Later in the press conference, Coach Tressel was asked about the fact that some of the USC players said they knew what Ohio State was going to do before you did it, and whether that concerned him:
That’s kind of a typical response when you win, is that, man, things went just the way we planned them and we knew they were going to do that blitz and this and that and we knew that Southern Cal was going to do what they were doing, we didn’t execute against it. So is that concerning? I don’t think you can blow it off and say, are we tipping someone off or this and that, or do we have a tendency to zone blitz at this time or whatever, but you’re really a good team when they know what you’re in and they can’t do anything about it. That’s when you become the best.”
