Mendenhall: More Optimistic Than Ever

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Head Coach Bronco Mendenhall

Opening Remarks

It’s good to be with you today. I’m glad you had the chance to meet with Coach Rose. Coach Rose is a good friend of mine and Holly and I had an opportunity to have dinner with him and Cheryl before the season and it was great to see him doing better. Optimistic and anxious to continue coaching, it was great to see his health returning. I am glad you got to talk with him about those things.

Moving on to the football part of it. I was disappointed with our loss, but after watching the film I’m as or more optimistic than ever about our football team and our future and reaching our goals. I am anxious to apply the lessons learned from the Florida State game and to apply them in our first conference game against Colorado State this week.

What was it about watching the game film that made your change your thoughts?

It’s interesting when you watch the game from the sideline, there is a skill and an art to it to try and take the emotion out of it and I’m still not where I need to be with that. You think you see what’s happening exactly and usually the best staffs are able to see that and make the appropriate real-time corrections. Which I think we made the appropriate corrections, but for instance, I spent a long time this morning with coach Hill and we were going through the plan and I counted 27 simple assignment errors – that’s over a third of the plays where a player at the point of attack just didn’t do what he was supposed to do at the same level that he had been doing it for the previous two weeks. So while it appears that sometimes you can get the feeling that given opponent is clearly better athletically or skill-wise, once you get to the root of what it is, fundamentals and execution really change the game and those are things that we have a chance to control, so optimism comes when something lies within your control and now we have a chance to apply that. I wouldn’t be nearly as optimistic if I didn’t think there was a thing that we could do with what the outcome was, but my feeling is not only are there things that we can do that are relatively easy an minor things, but it was an accumulation of relatively easy and minor things in critical situations that led to a long day for us.

Will there be any personnel changes?

I don’t think so. There are some injury concerns still. Russell Tialavea, by the way, did not have an ACL, the MRI showed it was an MCL grade three – two to four weeks is the time frame there. Romney Funga did play the majority of that game and played quite well, so you will see him starting at nose tackle. There might be more of a speed/rush type group come in on third-downs, you might see that, just because that’s not Romney’s strength. Russell is quick and is a good pass rusher, so you might see something like that. You possibly could see a little bit more of Leah Garry at boundary corner. He’s been working and really doing a nice job at practice so him and Brandon Bradley – it won’t be level split time, but you might see some of him. And then if we can get Scott Johnson back this week that would be great, but I can’t promise that as well, protocol still has a lot to do with that. Craig Bills, as a true freshman, graded at over 80-percent, did a really nice job. Not nearly as confident and precise at aligning the rest of the defense, but in terms of just holding on and doing what he’s supposed to do, I was pleased with just his first game.

Is this an ideal time to start conference play?

I don’t know if there is an ideal time, but if you look back at a broader perspective, I think many of us expected us to be 2-and-1 at this point in the year – probably thinking that our loss would be Oklahoma and we might have had a chance to win this game at home. The broader perspective was in why you play a game like Oklahoma and Florida State, my hope was that we would have lessons learned and we could start playing our best football before conference play begins. We certainly have a lot to work on after last week. Whether we can apply that quickly enough, that will determine if it is the best time or not. But certainly I am not afraid at having a setback or lessons to be applied before we start into conference. The test now is how quickly can we apply that.

You’ve won the coin toss three times and deferred it three times – will that change?

I don’t think so, the way our defense had been playing the first two games, I really like the idea of reestablishing field position as early as possible. I believe it’s harder to come out and execute offensively right off the bat than it is defensively – just because of handling the football. It’s paid off for us very well the first two games, it didn’t as Florida State had a very long and sustained drive to start out. Dennis Pitta deserves a lot of credit because he’s called the coin toss all three weeks and as he reminds me, he’s three-for-three.

You’ve won a lot of games, but when you lose you tend to lose big, are you concerned about that?

I talked with our coaches about that this morning. One of the things we can do a lot better job of is sometimes when the lead or the margin comes toward three scores, the tendencies are to chance and maybe become someone different. What I’m clear on now with three losses within two years that were of a larger margin than I think the previous couple of years we hadn’t lost by more than a touchdown. The idea simply is that we’re best when we remain who we are systematically moving the football. We tend to score quite well and defend quite well – when we start to take chances on either side is when we tend to have mistakes compound. If I have learned anything – and I’m still learning – it’s regardless of number of scores, we need to maintain our identity. That is what will be our best answer. It might be questioned; can you catch up in as much time? Can you make enough stops in enough time? Just from what I’ve seen, we’re going to have a better chance to do that than by going outside of ourselves – which does compound errors and most specifically, turnovers. If that one statistic alone in the game were different, I’m not saying that we would win the game, but it would certainly be closer.

During the breaks in the action there was a lot of work being done on that field – are you concerned about how that turf is going to hold up?

It’s slipping and there are chunks coming up and I don’t think there is much we can do about it. I think they put it in correctly and I saw them working on it hard after. But our players noticed it and what we do to fix it, I’m not certain of it. We just need to make our players aware. But I don’t want to play tentative. There were times in the game when both Florida State players were falling down without really being hit that hard and certainly some of our blitzes as we were hitting we were slipping and sliding and were a half of a gap off, etc. So we’ll have to adjust to it the best we can – possibly even do a walk-through on a Friday or something over there.

Do you get the indication that maybe it’s just the first year of the field?

That’s what I’ve heard, but I haven’t spent much time researching.

A lot of fans expected you to break into the BCS after the Oklahoma win – how do you quell the expectations that those people had?

I’ve never made that our first and foremost goal. On the long horizon I’d love to win a national championship, but this is a work in progress toward that. The pavers are conference championships, that how we’re going to get there. I never professed we’d be undefeated, never predicted we would be undefeated by winning the Oklahoma game. I’m not sure what you can do to quell expectations. I think many expected us to come out of that first game with a loss. We’ve had a very good schedule for the first three games – we’re 2-1 and we have a good football team and I think the only way to ride through the ups and downs of fan sentiment is to be consistent and play well. And if we do that, then we’ll end up wherever we’re supposed to be. It was nice to be recognized and ranked as high as we were, but again as I’ve always said, it’s not until about week six when you know how good you really are. We’ll get a clearer idea of how good we are and our fans will as well. I just hope they’ll keep supporting us and that one loss against Florida State doesn’t change their opinion of what we have accomplished and what we are capable of accomplishing.