GEORGIA TECH HEAD COACH PAUL JOHNSON
Opening Statement
“Well that’s a lot more fun than what’s happened. I thought offensively we were very efficient. We went back and tried to simplify and just make sure we did things the right way. I don’t think we had a penalty on offense, and we might have had one bad snap, but the ball was never out. When you do that, you have a chance. Defensively we gave up some yardage and some first downs, but we did a decent job keeping them out of the end zone, and we got some turnovers that set up short scores. It was a crazy game. For a team that goes fast, I think there was only eight or nine offensive possessions, so there wasn’t a lot of possessions. And the way the game was going, we were pretty efficient on offense, so it felt like we pretty much had the game in hand”
On the offensive pitch relationships:
“It was a little better. We spent a lot of time working on it. There is still a lot of things we got to get better at. That looked more like one of our football teams.”
On TaQuon Marshall’s passing being better today than it has been in the past:
“Yeah, when you give him time. Nobody can throw the ball when they don’t have time. Most of the stuff we threw today was play action other than the first play. We were trying to isolate on a certain person and other than that it was pretty much all play action. The one he threw to Qua [Searcy] could have been caught. He came out and played a clean game, I don’t know if he missed a read on the option, got the ball dealt and played very well.”
On building rhythm against different opponents:
“We played better, we didn’t put the ball on the ground, we dint turn the ball over, we didn’t have the stupid penalties. It’s like I told our guys: it’s about us not who you played most of the time. It’s about you. Next week we got to go to Louisville to play and it’s still going to be about us. You got to play without putting the ball on the ground, you can’t have a bunch of missed assignments and missed coverages. We still got some work to do on the tempo stuff. They got us several times especially on short yardage, with sneaks and snapping the ball before were ready to play. There is still a lot to work on. It‘s disappointing, we had a penalty on Juanyeh’s [Thomas] kickoff return. He did a nice job with that. The one guy who has been pretty consistent for the most part of the year is Pressley [Harvin III] punting the ball. He had a great punt, we wore him out last week, so it was good we didn’t have to use him much today.”
On the game being more about Tech instead of the opponent today:
“We dug ourselves a hole and we’ve got to dig it out one week at a time. It’s not undoable. It’s like I said, we have to go to Louisville now and win an ACC game on the road and then we are back to even. Then we play the last part of the season and we will see where it goes.”
On having a short week and then only playing starters for around two quarters:
“We will practice tomorrow, so we have to change the schedule. We gave the kids Friday off. They had Friday this week off, we didn’t have any meeting or anything. Maybe that’s what we need to do all the time. Literally, when I coached at Georgia Southern, we never met on Friday, never went to a hotel and we managed to win 38 games in a row at home, so it might be overrated.”
On the defensive line:
“Anree [Saint-Amour] was playing hard. It’s hard to tell until you watch the tape. Victor [Alexander] had a big play where they kind of turned him lose on the back side and he got a big sack and forced a fumble. We had some plays but we’ve just got to be better on third down.”
On the adjustments made on defense:
“They [Bowling Green] have some pretty good wide receivers, they were quick. To start the game, we weren’t getting inside the third guy in some of those RPOs. We changed some of that. We started to stem a little bit, but there wasn’t a great deal of change. Like anything with the defense for Nate [Woody], sometimes it’s frustrating because he doesn’t have everything in and sometimes there is stuff you want to run that’s not in, and so we stay fairly vanilla at times, which is what we did on offense. The more we are out there the more he’ll get in and the more pressure stuff you will see.”
On the fundamentals talked about last week and the progress made today:
“I thought we did a good job against the run game. They [Bowling Green] struggled to run the ball and they became somewhat one dimensional. While they converted too many third downs and possessed the ball 33 minutes and we were 26 minutes, and that’s some of it scoring a little faster on offense, but their third downs were 11 of 19. We aren’t going to survive like that, we have to do better on third down.”