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Groh Press Conference Video Highlights
Sept. 5, 2006
Charlottesville, Va. –
Q: Is the 3-4 defense that Wyoming runs similar to the 3-4 that Virginia runs?
Groh: It has a lot of similarities. One of the things about the scheme is that it has a lot of versatility. Those people that run it can cater it to the type of players that you have at the time. You can see where they have been able to do that right from the start to shape it to the players they have. Let’s say this, most weeks when we are attempting to run the opposing defense against our offense, its quite a different scheme than they are used to running. We can call a lot of the defenses by the same names and the players are able to run them.
Q: What jumps out at you about Wyoming offensively and defensively?
Groh: Well as I mentioned last evening, one of the really significant things that coaches might only see, maybe because it only occurs 4, 5, 6, maybe seven times a game that escapes the casual look of other people is the punting. They have a punter who averages 47 yards a kick and that is consistent with his junior college yardage. There is a lot of field position swing, that’s three yards short of half the field. Any time the ball moves half the field on one play that is pretty significant. If you had seven 50-yard passes during a game that would be a pretty good game passing the ball. However many times we can force it to occur times when the ball moves, as far as we’re concerned in the wrong direction, it moves 50 yards towards our goal line. We have to figure out a way to bring that back to minimize the net punting, or to improve our net punting so that the deferential doesn’t change the field position swing as it just keeps adding up. That’s one thing.
The other thing is a uniqueness in the style of offense that we’re going to see. It bears some resemblances to, to try and paint a picture of it, of the old run and shoot in the past. A lot of unusual combinations, teams that throw a lot of what I like to call “likely to be caught” passes. Like last week, they threw nine or 10 screens in the game. Now we like to throw screens too, but that’s a lot of screens in a game and they have five or six different types of screens. So that’s a unique aspect. Most teams that throw that many “likely to be caught” passes, that is usually indicative of a philosophy, meaning that they want the ball to be caught, whether it’s for two yards, five yards, whatever. They don’t want many incompletes. They have a considerable amount of up the field passing that goes with it, that kind of belies that particularly mentality, it’s kind of a different swing than most of the teams we will play.
As we just discussed the only novelty in the defensive scheme is that its novel for us to face it, but it’s not novel in terms of what our knowledge or awareness of it is.
Q: After Saturday’s game you mentioned that competitors will always come right back. What have you seen since then from your team?
Groh: I have only been with them for one day and in the long run I don’t want to fall back on the same answer all the time, but frankly the answer for most weeks is going to be “we’ll see on Saturday.” Since we are in an academic environment, we can relate it to academic circumstances. In the long run the students get their grades on the answers they put on the test. I don’t think many professors give students grades on the time they spent in the library. It’s not like wrestling, you don’t get riding time. If you go to the library for a long time, spend 10 hours there, but you answer the question wrong on the test, you get a pat on the back for the diligence, but you only get your grade for what you put on the test. I would give our players a very positive grade for the diligence of their preparation from last January to last Friday evening. I don’t give our team a very high grade for what we did on Saturday and that’s the only grade that counts. I took some solace from the fact that I saw eight plays from last night of the last few minutes of the Miami game, during that time I saw Miami, who usually does pretty well, fumble a handoff, throw an interception, literally hit themselves in the butt with a shotgun snap and drop a pass in a critical situation, all on top of rushing for one yard during the course of the game. I guess the virus is not isolated in terms of that type of play.
Q: Do you ascribe to the theory that teams improve the most between the first and second game?
Groh: I am a member of the coaching profession and proud of it, but I try to make my answers my own answers. I am pretty intent this week to not fall back on the answers many coaches are going to use at their press conferences this week that teams show the most improvement between game one and game two. I certainly think there is ample opportunity for that, particularly in our case, but I would rather just say that as it applies to this particular situation and fall back on it as kind of one of those that I can pull out of my file box with answers for week 4, week 5, and week 7. That’s one of the patented week 2 answers.
Q: What did you think of the relative speed of Pittsburgh versus your own speed offensively and defensively?
Groh: Pittsburgh has built their defense to be a speed defense. That’s how Dave’s defenses are always built. That’s what they did in Dallas, Miami, here. In other words they take some players who in certain schemes would be deemed undersized for their position but fit the model for what they are looking for and try to do that from a speed standpoint and part of that scheme involves having lockdown corners to make up for some of the things they do. They have to add their safeties to the running game very aggressively, so you have eight or nine guys involved in the run, that’s always been their m.o. so it’s what we expected.
With our own speed, Michael Johnson got the ball offensively on a screen and a couple other times but he didn’t really get a chance to kick the jets down. He did well on the kickoff return, he went from one corner to the other and turned the edge, just ran out of space, and ran by some guys doing that. One the other side of the issue, as it should be, with our defense, we showed more quickness than some of the previous models. That’s the type of defense it is this year. We’ve gone from two 255-pound linebackers to at least one guy who is a lot smaller than that. There is a difference in the type of defensive ends that we have, from the Chris Cantys and Brennan Schmidts, to Chris (Long) and Jeffrey (Fitzgerald), so we are built in a little bit different style.
Q: How did the first game with a new offensive coordinator go?
Groh: The organization of it went fine. All of us, from the head coach down to the new offensive staff, wish that some of the planning and some of the calls had resulted in more production. With Michael (Groh) and John (Garrett) in collaboration in a very similar fashion of how they did in Nashville, Saturday night wasn’t much difference from how it went over there. Probably the biggest difference wasn’t Mike and John working together but that they were making the calls without (Marques) Hagans, (D’Brickashaw) Ferguson, (Brad) Butler, and some of those individuals who were there in Nashville.
Q: You talked earlier about players who are mentally tough. With some of the younger players on the team who had a tough night on Saturday do you pull them aside and speak to them or do you let them figure it out themselves?
Groh: Those are challenging circumstances in any league. They talk about it in the NFL about the challenges for rookies, especially offensive lineman. I can remember talking about in great length over the years about how well D’Brickashaw Ferguson did in the early going, remarkably well for a young player. But I can remember talking to him in a game up in Penn State where he did experience one of his rough evenings to a guy who went on to become a first round draft choice. Telling him at that time, `look this guy has been in the weight room for four or five years longer than you have, he has seen a lot of pass blockers before. Just give yourself some time and you will be teaching someone else the same lessons’ and that certainly was the case in the following years of his career. Certainly that will be the circumstance with some of these players. By the same token, we also talked to them about the fact that these guys aren’t going away, they are going to be coming every Saturday. Some Saturdays more will be coming than what you just saw. There is no place to hide.
Q: Do you think there will be any residual effect from the number of times that Chris Gould kicks the ball?
Groh: We will have to see. The only thing that comes out of my experience with statistics was a two semester required course in the Commerce School. The fact that I took four semesters of statistics probably gives you an insight as to how well I did in that. But one of the things that I do remember from my struggle with statistics is that the legitimacy of the sample size has a lot to do with the conclusions. So for a lot of the answers to any of the questions, whether they are yours or mine about our team, and with anybody’s team to this point, the sample size is too small to come to any conclusions right now. Chris Gould’s kicks or Miami’s offense or if you scored 50 points this week, the sample size is too small for you to be called a scoring juggernaut because the competition and all those things have something to do with it. Chris’s punting wasn’t all that different from what it was when that was all he was doing. What it was different from was what he was doing in the 10 days previous to the game. But again, the only grade that counts is the one that you get in the game.
Q: Does it take longer to develop the kind of chemistry you need along the offensive line than it does at any other spot?
Groh: Yes. For one, they are so close quartered in there and they’re so many quick changes that occur. The defensive lineman slides from one shade to the other and you’ve made the line call and you have to stay in it, but it’s happened enough times before where you and I are working together and I just know that when this guy shades inside you’re going to take him and I can move on to the next guy; we’ve just done it together often enough. There may not be enough time for me to say, `You take him, you take him,” I know that you’re going to and you know that I’m going to. I’d say the other spot where it’s the most that way when you and I both know the same thing is with the quarterback and the receiver. Against a particular coverage, the quarterback has seen the receiver run the route against this zone often enough that he now knows at what spot within this zone the receiver is going to sit down and kind of lull the opening. Rather than lead him into the next defender where he’s going to throw the ball, I’d say those are the two areas where the unspoken communication works the most often in football.
Q: In what areas can Christian Olsen get better?
Groh: I think it’s pretty obvious, we just need a better overall performance. He’s not alone in that respect, but we certainly didn’t get much in terms of big plays, we didn’t get things to sustain drives. Now he had a tough go of it because he didn’t have much of a running game to go with and he had a lot of squeeze on the pocket that he couldn’t deal with. He didn’t get the kind of help that any quarterback needs to have. But it’s in all aspects of his play, just as it’s in all aspects of the team’s play.
Q: Now that you’re coaching a position like you have in the past, do you take games like last week’s personally?
Groh: I think we all do. I know I always did. When I was only one of 10, I still always thought I was the reason the team lost. Now that I’m responsible for 10 positions, I feel 10 times that way. I don’t think I’ve ever been involved in a game that my team lost, whether our side of the ball played well or didn’t play well, that I didn’t feel that if I had done more that the outcome would have been different.