Hope's Weekly Wisdom Hour

The Boiling Point: Danny Hope held his weekly Tuesday press conference.

Danny Hope held his usual Tuesday press conference today to look back at his team’s win over then-No.23 Illinois and ahead to its trip to Michigan Saturday. Following are some excerpts from the hour press conference. After the jump is the entire transcript.

COACH HOPE: Well, Caleb is our quarterback, and we want to play two quarterbacks. We always want to have a second quarterback that’s ready to play. We always want to have another quarterback that’s competing to be the guy, a guy that we can put into a game that has had enough reps and has enough confidence and has had enough game experience to still win the ballgame with, and that’s the beauty of having Robert Marve here. He’s a great talent. He has too much talent to be on the sidelines. We want him to play. Saturday Caleb really played well in the first half and we were starting off fast as a football team, offensively, defensively and special teams, as well, and he was throwing the ball very well, making plays when we were in rhythm, and we opted not to put Robert in in the first half. We wanted to try to get another quarterback in the game sometime in the first half, but we opted not to on Saturday, and sometimes when you opt not to put him in in the first half, then the second half gets tight and you don’t get the No. 2 guy in.

But we’re still committed to getting another quarterback ready, one that can help us win, and a guy like Robert Marve is a great talent, and he can certainly help our football team.

Q. And then with Michigan in particular, Denard Robinson and the problems he presents obviously as a dual-threat quarterback and trying to contain that?
COACH HOPE: Well, he’s unbelievable, he really is. He’s a fantastic player, and certainly one of the best players in all of college football. You’re not going to stop him, but you hope that you can minimize his production enough to give yourself a chance to compete and win. But he can be a difference maker in any ballgame on any play.
We sat around and looked at a bunch of film on him, and he is really an outstanding athlete and great team player, so he alone, along with all his other great teammates, they’re a very, very good football team. But he is really a difference maker for any club.

Q. As an ordinary quarterback you’d want to get pressure on him and knock him around, but with his elusiveness does that create even extra stress, if you put too much pressure, now he gets loose, now he’s running for 20, 30 yards?
COACH HOPE: Every play he’s out there he creates some type of potential stress. He’s either a guy that’s going to throw the ball or a guy they’ve manufactured to carry the ball or try to get him in a situation to play option football, and when everything breaks down around him, and if it does, he can take it, tuck it and take off and create all kinds of problems. He’s a fantastic football player.

Q. Coach, I was just wondering how much confidence your team is playing with now after the past three games and how well they’ve been playing.
COACH HOPE: I don’t know how to come up with an exact measurement, but obviously our confidence is increasing. We’ve played better, and we’ve improved as a football team. I think a big part of it has to do with our quarterback. I think he’s playing a lot better, a lot more sure. That’s pivotal for our football team.
And our defense has stepped it up. Some guys have maybe taken their game to a new level. Some guys have and some guys still need to, but we’re definitely getting better, and we’re gaining confidence.

Q. With Caleb over the weekend, what did he do well that obviously he’s been building towards, and how much does that help him and help this offense going forward?
COACH HOPE: I think he’s gotten better every game, and he’s always a guy that I thought had good composure about him and was able to kind of keep it all together. Even in the very beginning of the season when he hadn’t played in a while, I thought he just had a good composure about him. But he’s been accurate, and he’s gotten us out of a lot of bad situations and made good plays out of it.
In the first half of the game on Saturday, he was — first quarter of the game Saturday he was eight out of ten for 100 yards and a touchdown, and that included a drop and a throwaway, so he was really nine for nine and a touchdown. He played really well again the second half and went in with quarterback stats of 13 out of 15 and 145 yards and two touchdowns. So he’s been consistent.
He’s done a good job with the ball security part of it. He’s made a few mistakes and learned from them, but I think everything about the quarterback play is improving, and I think he’s one of the reasons why we’re doing a lot better as a team.

Q. I know that you’ve been playing the two quarterbacks and you like playing the two quarterbacks, but that kind of performance, the way his team rallied around him, does that signal maybe giving him more of the game reps on a Saturday?
COACH HOPE: Well, Caleb is our quarterback, and we want to play two quarterbacks. We always want to have a second quarterback that’s ready to play. We always want to have another quarterback that’s competing to be the guy, a guy that we can put into a game that has had enough reps and has enough confidence and has had enough game experience to still win the ballgame with, and that’s the beauty of having Robert Marve here. He’s a great talent. He has too much talent to be on the sidelines. We want him to play. Saturday Caleb really played well in the first half and we were starting off fast as a football team, offensively, defensively and special teams, as well, and he was throwing the ball very well, making plays when we were in rhythm, and we opted not to put Robert in in the first half. We wanted to try to get another quarterback in the game sometime in the first half, but we opted not to on Saturday, and sometimes when you opt not to put him in in the first half, then the second half gets tight and you don’t get the No. 2 guy in.
But we’re still committed to getting another quarterback ready, one that can help us win, and a guy like Robert Marve is a great talent, and he can certainly help our football team.

Q. I wanted to touch base with Ricardo Allen and the way he has played this year. Can you talk about that a little bit, and even his knack for returning interceptions for touchdowns?
COACH HOPE: Well, he’s played very well. He hasn’t played great all the time. He’s been challenged some. Early in the season we were not manufacturing a whole lot of pass rush, and any time that that happens that creates a challenge for the back half, particularly the secondary, and we’ve played against some very talented receivers, some of the best receivers in the country, and a lot of times when you’re playing a great opponent like that with a great player like that, you’ll do some match-ups. So we put him in a very competitive situation throughout the course of the game, and I think he’s done outstanding.
A couple times when he hasn’t played as well as he wanted to on a particular play, I think he’s done a great job of rebounding and making a big play or making a difference throughout the rest of the game. So I really like resilience that he has.
Saturday after looking at the game film from Saturday, I thought he did a heck of a job, and we had him matched up on their top receiver, and the other phases of his jobs on Saturday, the run support wise, everything, I thought he did very well Saturday. So he’s a heck of a player. He loves to play the game.
He is very fast, and he usually or often picks the ball off in full speed, in full stride. He makes decisions. He has confidence, he breaks on the ball, and he usually catches it in full stride and often times he can take it the length of the field. So I think his knack for breaking on the ball and taking it off in full stride and the confidence that he has has enabled him to take some to the house.

Q. And then with Michigan in particular, Denard Robinson and the problems he presents obviously as a dual-threat quarterback and trying to contain that?
COACH HOPE: Well, he’s unbelievable, he really is. He’s a fantastic player, and certainly one of the best players in all of college football. You’re not going to stop him, but you hope that you can minimize his production enough to give yourself a chance to compete and win. But he can be a difference maker in any ballgame on any play.
We sat around and looked at a bunch of film on him, and he is really an outstanding athlete and great team player, so he alone, along with all his other great teammates, they’re a very, very good football team. But he is really a difference maker for any club.

Q. How is their offense different from the one you’re used to seeing from them the last couple years?
COACH HOPE: They brought some of their offense with them, a lot of their offense with them, the new coaching staff did, and they employed a lot of that, which some of it you may refer to as some West Coast offense. There’s a tight end in the ballgame, sometimes there’s two backs in the ballgame with some drop-back passing, pocket passing, some West Coast style offense and pro style offense that they’re very good at. And then they also retained some of the things that any offense would like to have that would be tailor made for Denard Robinson.
I wouldn’t say they’re a mix of the two; they’re a new offense, but they’re still doing some of the things they did the past couple years with Denard, and that’s featuring him as a ball carrier.

Q. Without giving away your game plan, is it a situation where you want to make Robinson throw?
COACH HOPE: Well, depends on the situation. You know, we have to — he’s a dual-threat quarterback, just the same as we were facing last week in my mind. Both those guys have manufactured a lot of plays and are great skill players. Last year — last week did you want Scheelhaase to throw to that great receiver an inordinate amount of times? I’m not sure, so you kind of have to pick your poison in order to get some balance, whether it’s Denard Robinson or Scheelhaase or any really true, great duel-threat quarterback, and they both are.

Q. They’ve struggled the last couple years on defense. They’re a lot better now. What’s kind of changed from one year to the next there?
COACH HOPE: Well, they’re very big and strong. They have a very, very big, strong defensive front, and they’re very, very tough across the front. That’s nothing new, but I’m just telling you what I’m seeing on film. They have a big, tough defensive line, very big and very strong. But they’ve changed their schemes. They were a 3-4 team, they brought a lot of pressure out of their OT defense. They were a high-pressure football team and they brought it often and they brought it a lot. They took some chances.
Now they’re an even front. They’re very physical across the front. They try to whip you with their defensive front. They are less pressure oriented. They can and have already throughout the course of the year have dialed up a lot of pressure, and they’re good at it. They’re kind of like Penn State in some ways. Penn State can line up with their big, physical front and they can play bases with you and they can dial up some blitzes and some pressures that can really give you some problems.
And I see Michigan the same; they can line up in base and get after you, or they can dial up some pressures and give you even more things to have to handle. So they’re a good defensive front. They can press you but they’re more base, or they have been more base, and they’re a different style. They’re an even front, four-guy alignment compared to what we saw the last couple years for the most part.

Q. A couple quick questions about your offense. First of all, I think your offense has scored a touchdown on 21 straight trips into the red zone. What’s kind of allowed your offense to be so successful down there?
COACH HOPE: I think we’re more consistent from a run standpoint and being balanced as an offense when — we hired Patrick Higgins a year ago. At Brigham Young, they were very good in the red zone. That’s one of the things about him that excited me in the interview process is the success they had had at Brigham Young, and then their red zone offense had been very productive. He has some good ideas and good suggestions, some things that they hung their hat on.
But I think the emergence of a strong running game is a big part of it, and also the fact that our quarterback does a pretty good job for a first-year starting in the decision-making parts of his play. He doesn’t make a whole lot of bad decisions and he doesn’t make a whole lot of the same mistakes twice, and we’ve been consistent down in the red zone because our quarterback has made good decisions and we’ve done a good job of running the football and having the threat of a run game inside of the red zone.

Q. You’ve also had ten scoring drives this year of 80 or more yards. Is this kind of a lot of the same things you talked about? That would seem a little bit surprising given the inexperience you came into the season with at quarterback, but obviously it hasn’t made that much of an impact.
COACH HOPE: Well, I think it has to do with a lot of different things. Play calling, I think Coach Nord does a great job from a play calling standpoint. I think he does a great job of manufacturing ways to get the ball in his playmaker’s hands and keeps things very, very simple.
I think Caleb’s knack for being on task and being able to avoid making bad plays is a part of it. I think the fact that we have two good fast-running halfbacks and strong fullbacks that can play, the fact that we mix it up some, I think it’s a combination of a lot of things that we’re doing well, and you can sum it up where we’re executing a lot better on offense, and as a result we’re maintaining some long drives.

Q. The last couple games you’ve gone with the five offensive linemen throughout the entirety almost, I think. Some of that has been because of injury, but do you like what you’re getting from those five and maybe the continuity there has helped them out a little bit?
COACH HOPE: I don’t think when we lost Justin Kitchens and went with Trevor Foy that there was any dropoff. Both those guys are similar in some ways where they’re tall, athletic, quick-footed offensive tackles with some suddenness and some fight about them. They’re not the biggest, they’re not 320-pounders, they’re both about 280 pounds, but they have good suddenness and good quickness. So I don’t think there was any dropoff when we had the injury to Justin Kitchens, and that’s very fortunate. We could have had a big dropoff at the right tackle position, and maybe if that was going to happen we would have had to move Mondek back to right tackle and try someone else in there at right guard, so I think Trevor Boyd stepping up and being ready to play, again being a good football player, has allowed us to stay with most of the guys lined up in the same spots.

Q. I know Justin was starting to come back last week and then couldn’t keep going throughout the week. Do you think he’s going to be a little closer this week?
COACH HOPE: I hope so. Maybe a repeat of the same. Last week we held him out of practice, the week before last week we held him out of practice and didn’t have to play him in the game. He wasn’t ready, and then we thought when he came back out — he didn’t practice on Sunday, didn’t practice on Monday, and Tuesday he came out and he felt really good, and he went in there and he got after it and had a great practice and he was fresh, and boy, he looked great. I thought, these guys will both be ready to play and we can kind of rotate them in there and have two, fresh, tall scrapping tackles out there; this is going to be good.
Then Wednesday he got to practice and Justin had his arm in a sling, so that was a little setback. But the type of injury that he has is one of those things that you can experiment with it as the player and learn how to play with it. And Trevor Boyd has a similar injury. He’s had it for a longer period of time. He had his repaired, but at one point in time he was learning how to play with it, and I think that’s where Justin is now. He can support it in some ways, and as it heals up some, I think he’ll be able to get out there and compete, and I’m hoping it’s this Saturday.

Q. Dwayne Beckford seems to have taken a pretty good step forward in the last three weeks or so. What have you seen in his play that you’ve liked here recently?
COACH HOPE: Everything. I think there are a lot of guys on our football team, and we’ve mentioned it just about every Monday press conference or Tuesday press conference, that I think we’re getting better as a football team, and I think he represents that very well, and the light is coming on for him in some ways. He’s taken some steps as a player. He’s taken his game to another level, and I think Kawann Short has taken his game to another level, and TerBush has taken his game to another level. I think a lot of players on our football team are taking their game to another level right now, and he certainly fits into that trend.
He’s been much more sure of his keys and reads, and that’s the whole thing playing the linebacker position; it isn’t being fundamentally sound on how you go about taking on blockers and getting off blocks and how you go about executing your assignment, and he has really polished up his play significantly in the last three weeks. He’s had some consistency from a teaching standpoint from his position coach, and I think a lot of the things that Coach Elmassian is trying to get engrained into his position players are starting to become part of them as far as their play and execution goes, so I think everything about Dwayne has gotten better.
Now that he’s more sure, he plays faster, and now that he’s more sure, he plays more aggressive, and now that he’s more sure, he’s making more plays, and now that he’s more sure, he’s not screwing up as many plays. So everything about his game is getting better in my mind, and he’s very, very focused in practice. That’s a first big step for him. To be as focused as he has been is a good sign.

Q. Two years ago you went up there to Michigan and won that game, won in their place for the first time since the moon started rising, I think. Is that a reference point that you use with this team, because there’s a lot of guys from that ’09 team that are still with you.
COACH HOPE: Well, obviously we’ll have to reference it some, but this is a new team, and I think it’s still great to have guys that have been up there before. But regardless of who the opponent is or which Saturday it is, we want to take the field because we think we can beat anyone anywhere. That has always been our approach. It’s the old you have to play well to make that happen, and we’re playing well right now as a football team.
We’ll have to play even better because the competition is even tougher. That’s a really tough environment, and they’ve had a couple weeks to prepare for us, so we have to pick our game up even more. If we don’t, we’ll be hard-pressed to go up to a great venue and come out with a W.

Q. What do you remember about that victory?
COACH HOPE: It was a lot of fun, like any victory, a lot of fun.

Q. With Justin Siller, how do you think he’s handled his business in general since he had the academic situation two years ago, and just for him to come back and be a member of this team and produce and be one of the leaders on this club, too?
COACH HOPE: I think it’s a great success story. I felt the same way about Justin before he had to sit out a season. Sometimes young people don’t make the best decisions, and Justin was in that situation like that a couple years back. But we always thought he was pretty special all along, great to get him back.
He really fell behind a lot as a football player. I haven’t had any football players that missed such significant amount of playing time that don’t drop off as a player. We’re redeveloping Robert Marve, getting him just a lot of playing time. Everybody that has had to sit out for a length of time, they drop off some as a player, it’s hard to get that back.
And then Justin got injured last year. He was just starting to get used to it again, and we changed positions with him and had him at the wide receiver position, and he really struggled from a stamina standpoint. He’s a big receiver, and most people that make that move aren’t used to the amount of running that’s involved in that position. So he spent a lot of his indoctrination at the wide receiver position just dying for air and trying to recover physically, and right when he started to bounce back some, we had to put him at quarterback, then he got injured, so he missed a whole bunch of time again. He didn’t get hardly anything done in the spring, and he wasn’t getting nearly as much done as we wanted him to, so really in mind he’s just now having a chance to start getting it all together again as a player. I like everything about him as a person. I think he’s a good leader, he’s a lot of fun to be around. I think he’s a winner. He’s a smart guy, a really hard worker, and I think he’s just now starting to become the player that he can be again, just in the last couple weeks. He’s more sure, and he’s got his legs back underneath him again.
He really struggled in camp. He had a turf toe or something that really slowed him down, and I think he’s really now just coming on. He’s another guy on our football team that the light’s coming on and he’s taking his game to another level. The timing is good.
We’ve been talking all along that I think we’re going to be a pretty good football team, and we need to get better week by week, and I see that out of Justin stiller.

Q. Obviously you feel comfortable with him at receiver but you obviously used him in the wildcat last weak, too. You don’t think that will slow his progress as a wide receiver?
COACH HOPE: I think it sped it up because I think he’s a good ball carrier with the ball in his hand, or he can be. It’s a lot different when you’re catching it 15, 20 yards away compared to getting it at the snap. He was much more accustomed to handling the ball in that fashion. I think he’s more aggressive and more assertive as a runner and as a quarterback at times playing football than he is as a wide receiver.
So I think it’s going to make him a more aggressive runner, a more sure runner if he’s more involved in the offense. Now he’s a bigger part of it. He’s a senior, and I think he’s taken a lot of pride in that. I think that’s part of his stepping his game up some the last couple weeks is us putting him in a position where we have to count on him, so I think it’s going to make him a better receiver, a better football player, and that will make you a better receiver.

Q. I asked you a question Sunday about you simplified the defense, and an example of that — I did want to zero in on —
COACH HOPE: That’s the part I don’t like, that zeroing in stuff.

Q. But when you did simplify the defense, was it for the entire defense or did you need to simplify things even for the linebacker corps, the secondary or —
COACH HOPE: Everybody.

Q. Was it everybody?
COACH HOPE: Everybody, absolutely. We just had to — you can’t throw the whole kitchen sink at them all the time.

Q. The game plan against Illinois, obviously it worked to just kind of try to contain Scheelhaase on the edges with your ends and maybe let them do some more things kind of up the middle. Would that be potentially a similar approach you can take with Robinson, or is he different in that way?
COACH HOPE: Well, it can be in some ways, but they utilize Denard a lot more as a runner. I feel like with Scheelhaase, the first thing they’d like for him to be involved in is the run read option part of the game. The next thing they want to do is they want him to hand it off. I think with Denard, he’s the primary ball carrier with his run read option, or if that’s not there, he’s the primary ball carrier on quarterback power, quarterback lead, much more a part of the run game plan. There might be some carryover, but they’re different players and different threats.
Both great players, both present a lot of challenges for your defense, but Denard Robinson is a whole ‘nother threat in some ways with the class of speed that he has and what he can do with such a small amount of space and what he can manufacture it into is really amazing. He’s an unbelievable player, he really is.

Q. We’ve talked a lot about Kawann, but it seems like he’s having a lot of success when he plays the three technique and you’re able to get him kind of one-on-one on those guys. Does it matter who the other tackle is with him on the field at a point if he’s going to play three technique or play right over the center, or how does that work?
COACH HOPE: Well, what matters first is maybe where Kawann is at. I think that’s really important because he’s one of our better players. And then we have some pretty big, strong defensive tackles. I felt coming into the season that that would be the strength potentially of our football team maybe as to who and what and how many good strong defensive tackles we had for this season, and we didn’t manufacture the dominance across the line of scrimmage that we wanted to early in the season, but I think we’re starting to now, and the last two or three games we had really gotten after it across the line of scrimmage and we’ve played against some good offensive lines, and we’re going to be really challenged again this weekend because Michigan’s offensive line is superb.
But the other tackle does matter. You have to have someone that can go in there and hold up at the nose spot or you can’t move Kawann around, or vice versa. You have to have someone you can put over the three technique and manufacture what you’re trying to get done at that position, so it does matter who the other guy is. But fortunately we have some guys.

Q. Brandon Taylor had gotten a start. Did he play more than Gaston? When you looked at that, did they get a pretty similar amount of snaps last week?
COACH HOPE: Pretty similar.

Q. I’m writing a story on Gerald, and you had kind of referenced it with Justin Siller. Obviously you hope these guys come in here and use this time to mature not just as a player but as a person and as a man. When did you say maybe kind of the light come on or however you want to say it with Gerald in terms of getting his business taken care of off the field and not getting into trouble and coming to meetings on time and just kind of really growing up? Did you notice a time?
COACH HOPE: Maybe so. You know, he has always been very accountable in regards to his football responsibilities. Football is really important to him, and he really wants to be a good player. When he really started to excel academically I thought is when he really started showing the biggest signs of maturity and growth in his development. He has taken some pride in being a good student. There’s been some semesters I believe he’s been a 3.7 or 3.8 GPA. So I think his academic performance has been maybe a catalyst in some ways for him from a growing-up standpoint.

Q. And injuries, too, you hope that the guys try to play through it and kind of show some of that toughness and leadership, too, when they’re able to do that. It sounds from talking to his teammates that what he’s been able to show this year and maybe play through more this year than he ever has before has spoken volumes, too, right?
COACH HOPE: It has, and he’s done a good job of sucking it up, and he’s been injured for a long time, and he feels better now. The one thing that’s always difficult is when you’re trying your best and you’re not having as much success as you’d like to have, and that’s what happens sometimes when you’re injured and you’re playing and you’re sucking it up. Sometimes it would be easier just not to suck it up and not play, and he’s went out and tried to push himself and tried to help the team win, and I’m glad that he’s gotten healthier and he feels better. He’s bigger and stronger than he was last year, even though he hasn’t been able to practice and maybe play quite as well as he has wanted to, he has been able to get bigger and get stronger, so he’s physically better in some ways. He’s bigger and stronger than he has been the last couple years, and he’s just now getting to where he can strain and play football like he used to. So I am happy for Gerald, and he’s making a difference, made a difference in the game this past Saturday.

Q. Can you talk about the petition that Rob Henry and some of the guys signed? Do you have any knowledge what’s going on there?
COACH HOPE: Very little. I heard about it this morning, and I’ll get with the players about it a little later on, but very little or interaction about it. It’s all brand new to me.

Q. Where do you stand with that whole college players being —
COACH HOPE: I don’t know. There’s a lot of details that you’d have to get ironed out. There’s some rationale behind the thinking because they put so much time in it now. They spend a lot more time on being a college athlete than we did 25 years ago for a lot of different reasons. Their days are 12- and 15-hour days. They put in long days.
You know, when academic reform was introduced, and it’s a great plan, but now they have to have a certain amount of hours completed towards their degree or they can’t play, it’s just not accumulating hours, so it’s changed what happens in summer school. Now summer school is a full load, and you’re taking real classes that count towards a degree in order to make progress toward your degree. Almost everyone is here now for summer school. They’re putting in 12- and 15-hour days, and those are the times of the school year where they were allowed to be on scholarship and also get side jobs, as well, from a compliance standpoint, and really in the last seven or eight years of college football, we haven’t had to look for many summer jobs because they’re all taking full loads of classes and hitting weights and getting in shape and all kinds of responsibilities and duties.
So I think they have to sit down and take a good look at what the college students’ lifestyle is like now and what their opportunities are to even earn any extra income and take that into consideration, and then you have to take into consideration where is the money going to come from and who gets it and who doesn’t and where does that stop or end a sense of fair play. I think there’s a whole lot of information that needs to get put on the table first before anyone can really make a rational decision based on that.

Q. Last weekend you guys spread the ball around a lot. Is it ever hard for you to decide who should go out in what situation with so many guys getting catching and rushing the ball?
COACH HOPE: I think it’s easier this way. That way no one can key on one guy, and again, it’s the way that our offensive staff and our offensive coordinator goes about their business in manufacturing different ways to get the ball into playmakers’ hands. That’s what it’s all about. If we can go out there and play well enough on the offensive line to hold up against all the pressure and all the blitzes and all the monsters that we have to play against with these Big Ten defenses to allow the quarterback to get the ball in the playmaker’s hands, we have enough playmakers on our football team to manufacture some offense and make some big plays and manufacture some points, and I think Coach Nord does a great job of spreading the ball around.
We go in there every week, and he sits down and we list the top playmakers on our offense that are available based on health and how they performed that week, and he comes up with a game plan on how he’s going to get the ball in those guys’ hands, a certain amount of times you’d like to get the ball in those guys’ hands, so it’s all something that’s part of their master plan when they go into the game on Saturday.

Q. You guys contained Denard pretty well last year. Do you guys go back to film of last year to see different ways or the same ways you guys can kind of hold him down a little bit?
COACH HOPE: We always do that. We always go back and look at last year’s film just to see where we might have been exploited at and make sure we don’t allow ourselves to have that Achilles heel available and then to see what we were successful with and to see if they’re still doing the same schemes. And that holds true some this week but not really near as much as we’d like for it to because they’re a bit of a different offensive style. They’re only doing a certain amount of things that they did with Denard last year, and a lot of stuff is the offense of a new head coach and their new coaches.

Q. I wanted to go back to Kawann getting the Big Ten honor this past week. What have you continued to see from him this season?
COACH HOPE: Well, he’s getting a lot better, and I’m not surprised to see him play at that level. I think he has the potential to play at that level on a week-by-week basis and even improve his level of play some. He has a great upside, and he still has a lot of room for improvement. He can be a dominant player at his position on a national level, and I think the light is coming on for him, and I think he’s taking his game to another level, and I think that’ll excite him and he’ll realize what he’s done to take that last big step, and I’ll bet he makes the same kind of commitment and does some of the same things in order to take another big step, so don’t be surprised to see him get even better this week.
But I’d like to see him be a defensive player of the week candidate or nominee every week. He has that type of potential. But he’s getting a lot better as a football player. A lot of it sometimes has to do with stamina and fortitude and pushing yourself ending up games — he’s played in some games where he’s had a lot of plays, and now he realizes, I can do that, and I can go even harder and still be able to hold up and play as many plays as they need me to play. And I think he’s gained a lot of confidence in his stamina and his fortitude as a player.
He’s really picked it up in regards to the explosiveness on the line of scrimmage. He’s a lot more explosive player now on the line of scrimmage on a consistent basis compared to this time last year, and his numbers indicate that. His plays indicate that.

Q. Obviously a big win last week. Were you concerned at all with the way the second half went?
COACH HOPE: No, we were able to win the game. That was a tough situation to be in in some ways because we had a good lead, but 21 points isn’t enough, and we wanted to go out there and stay on the field offensively and use the clock, burn up some time, and we held it up a lot. And Illinois is a very good defensive football team. They came into the game, I believe, ranked 12th defense in the country, have a very, very high-pressure defense. They came out and brought a lot of pressure in the second half, and that slowed down our effectiveness across the front.
We could have done some things to maybe help ourselves out, but again, we’re trying to burn the clock up the second half, created maybe a little bit more of a conservative approach, but I’m not concerned how we played the second half. We learned some things from it. Maybe we don’t play it quite that conservative. We did have a four-minute offense there, I believe, in the fourth quarter, which is always important to preserve a lead, and to be able to go out there and run the football some to manufacture that was important. But no, I’m not concerned how we played the second half. I think we played hard and played well.
I don’t think we put ourselves in position from a play-calling standpoint to manufacture as much offense as we possibly could. Sometimes when you are in position where you’re trying to manufacture as much offense as you can, you’re also taking some chances, and we took less chances. They started pressing up a little bit on the outside and maybe we didn’t want to throw it out there some, afraid to give up a pick. Maybe wanted to minimize the number of times we exchanged the ball on one play to minimize the odds of a turnover. So I think it was more the play-calling style.
Illinois, they’re a very good football team. They wanted to win, too, and three touchdowns is not that much in some ways when you have the explosive players that they have.

Q. Are you starting to see teams adjust in terms of the way they account for Kawann, try to block him? Has that started to happen yet?
COACH HOPE: Well, it’s going to happen more because he’s getting better. He’s making more noise obviously as a player, and he’s starting to make a bigger impact on the game in some ways, so I anticipate there will be some game planning and some scheming. We normally go into every game and try to have some type of scheme to slow down. It’s hard to stop a team’s very best player sometimes, but you have to go out there and try to minimize their production and performance, so I assume there will be some schemes that will be directed his way. I would. That’s just the way we do it.

Q. Caleb TerBush’s development, is it any way comparable to Joey Elliott during his season, or is that an apples-to-oranges type of thing?
COACH HOPE: Well, we’re hoping so in some ways. Joey started off the first half of the season and he only threw for about 800 yards or so. You’d have to look it up, but I don’t think he threw for 1,000 yards in the first half of the season, and by the end of the season he had thrown for 3,000 yards. And we’re getting much more comfortable at the quarterback position, and I think that’s going to begin to really open up our passing game, so I see some similarities in that fashion.
There’s a difference in age. Joey was a couple years older than Caleb, so I think Caleb has done a heck of a job. I don’t want to compare them as far as where they’re at, but I see some similarities in their development and what the potential of their development provides and presents for our offense and our team the second half of the season. We’ll be scoring more points, and we’ll become a better passing football team as this season progresses, there’s no question about it, because Caleb is getting better.

Q. Second place in the Big Ten leaders division, how does that sound to you and what does it mean to you?
COACH HOPE: It sounds great today. It doesn’t mean anything if we don’t win Saturday. Can’t spend a whole lot of time on that. We have to get ready to play. It’s going to be a tremendous challenge.

Hope’s Weekly Wisdom Hour

By Zach Langdon | Oct 25, 2011