Virginia Head Coach Mike London Quotes
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Miami vs. Virginia
Sun Life Stadium
Miami Gardens, Fla.
October 27, 2011
Postgame Quotes
Quotes for Virginia Coach Mike London
On team needing to find offensive identity…
I think when you have an opportunity to run the ball like that and run with authority that you always want to find what your identity is. Sometimes through game planning you look at things, you’re like ‘a certain pass might work here,’ but to get back to the true identity of who you are even if there is a down safety or you’re strutting of the edge, the mentality is we just have got to block it and the backs have to make that guy miss. Keep that type of mentality going. I think they kind of copied what NC State was doing last week with the extra man coming off the edge and chasing guys down from behind. That made us get after it and practice and look at how we can block things better, how the running backs can see the holes better. I thought today we got the type of game plan we practice for, basically and I was pleased that when it counted, when it mattered the ground game got us going.
On the touchdown Perry Jones threw…
We always practice a number of trick plays but when you practice those plays you try to use them conducive to what the other team does. We said before that Miami was a very fast, run-to-the-ball team and a lot of times if you can get that first initial reaction with pursuit, whether they’re coming up or the corners are involved in the run, we thought that we could fake that we were going to run a toss with Perry and Perry slowed down as he was going to stop block and then he took off. Perry made that throw all week in practice but there’s other things that you have and you plan for and that was one of the plays that we thought could work based on how aggressive they were.
On LaRoy…
When you read it on a playbook the line goes straight. Teams are allowed to run passes, run blocks and do different things and you have to learn how to take those blocks and learn how to maneuver and I think perhaps Roy would run a straight line and whatever happened, happened. But I think his development this year is not only does he run the straight line hard but he can react to his own run.
On passes to Jennings…
With Matt Snyder being out, Darrius kind of took that spot along with a couple other guys as far as route running was concerned. That’s how that worked out. Whatever covers your end, we throw the spots and he happened to be in a couple of spots that the ball was thrown to.
On Lamar Miller…
He’s an excellent running back. We always try to find the one that is on the other team. Obviously they had a bunch of them, a bunch of them with the quarterback, Miller, Benjamin, Streeter, a couple of offensive linemen. We thought we had to stop the run for sure, that was the main focal point of game plan this week. Make them throw the ball. They threw the ball and made some great catches but the guys did a great job defending the things that were giving us problems, and making plays in those situations. That last play guys scrambled all over the place. It’s amazing. I’m just really happy for the team right now.