Longo says he won't be conservative with Howell moving forward; pleased with focus on long drives

Assessing Sam Howell's performance

For a true freshman who was sitting in a high school class in December and now had to face an SEC defense on opening day, I think we’re all pretty happy with his overall performance. Tried to protect him early, get him some short, simple, quick throws and get him into a rhythm. Thought we established the running game, which we really needed to do to help him. I think that will be a theme every week, you want to get those three guys the football and get them going, I think that helps a younger quarterback and we were able to do that in the first half.

We were a little bit more conservative than I’m used to being because we wanted to make sure we came away with points. We had a couple opportunities in the red zone with Sam and the offense to maybe take a shot; there was a run option and a pass option on the play and we chose the run option when maybe we could have thrown one or two of them.

At halftime he seemed comfortable and he seemed confident and he was healthy, so we were able to open it up a little bit. We really don’t want to treat him like a freshman quarterback but I still was going to go into the game and protect him early and get him into a rhythm. We let him loose a little bit in the second half and he helped us win the ballgame.

On whether he will be conservative with Howell moving forward...

I think we’re kind of over that now. The first game of your career, the butterflies are gone and he’s our quarterback and he’s going to run the offense, and we’re going to run it the way we do with any veteran. From a knowledge standpoint, I think he’s not a freshman, so that’s a good thing, but getting used to the speed of the game and the bullets flying and what it’s really like in the game as opposed to what we try to do in practice are two different things. We got him through that and I think that’s over and we’re going to need to open it up to do a good job against Miami.

On whether Howell needs to learn to slide more...

There’s no doubt. If Sam were on defense, he’d be a middle linebacker; that’s his mentality … he’s physical and he’s used to running people over in high school and he’s used to getting the extra yard and he’s a competitor, but there’s health management in the game with a quarterback. You want to live to play another day, so as the game went on, I don’t know if you noticed, but he slid a few more times and I think he kind of learned that lesson as well and it’ll be something we keep preaching.

With Sam, ball security is his number one focus this week. Sliding and getting down after we’ve gotten a productive play, whether it’s him in a designed run or a scramble and just continuing to make good decisions in the offense. That’s probably what’s on the agenda for him the next four or five days getting ready for Miami.

On Howell's handling of pressure on Saturday...

There was some legitimate pressure on Saturday, which he actually handled well. We scrambled and moved and made some plays under what I would call legitimate pressure, he did a good job. We gave up two or three sacks and one of them was Sam’s fault, but on the other end of it, he handled pressure well and made some plays on the move. We moved maybe a little too much when there wasn’t legitimate pressure; we’d get a little bit of a flash of color or we stepped up too much into some pass rush, when maybe it was a healthy pocket. We’ll work at keeping him at the top of the drop so that we can get to the next look in the pass progression. I think those are just typical things you’re going to get out of a competitive freshman.

His assessment of the offensive tempo on Saturday

You can only go as fast as the officials go. Coaches are constantly trying to find a way to go faster, but you’re never going to be able to go faster than the 9-11 seconds, on average, that an officials crew takes to get the ball back in place.

On the running backs and rushing attack...

They brought a seventh and an eighth defender at times to try to stop the run game. We made no secret about liking the fact that we have three good running backs and all three of them did very well on Saturday. I would attribute it more to, Sam made some really good throws off the run game, the offensive line did a heck of a job blocking up front and we controlled the line of scrimmage for the most part. When you control the line of scrimmage, it gives the running backs a chance to beat the line of scrimmage … when you beat the line of scrimmage, it becomes more about the talent we have at that position.

Typically, if you meet Michael Carter at four yards, he’s going to get five or six. I think that holds true for all three of them. SO, when you win the line of scrimmage and can get your (backs) down the field a little bit, that’s where you get some of the prolific run plays we got, and I attribute that to the offensive line.

On the 98- and 95-yard scoring drives

We talked about us making a lot of mistakes and that keeps you from being consistent … we overcame a couple mistakes on those drives, but those were two of the more consistent drives that we had. They were drives where we had fewer and fewer plays during those two drives where we had a good amount of mistakes.

So, when you’ve got 11 people focused and they’re talented like I think we are, I don’t know if we’re going to be more talented than everybody we play, but 11 smart guys sometimes makes up for a lot of ground.

Those were the two most consistent drives we had in the game. We looked at last year and we had four drives of over 90 yards the entire season, and on Saturday, we had two. Part of those two drives, we had some explosive plays on both those drives; Sam dropped some dimes, we made some good catches, we had some explosive runs.

On Howell's accuracy on the deep throws

His accuracy on the deep balls is pretty good. The fade ball was excellent on Saturday. We tried to get a post off down the middle of the field and they did a good job of covering it and we had to go to something underneath.

It was nice to see the young receivers, they kind of jelled a little bit and I thought they picked up some momentum. We ran some better routes in the second half and they gave some better targets to Sam.

I think he’s very accurate, deep ball, I think he’s an accurate intermediate guy. Early in camp, he was not an accurate automatic throw guy. He was struggling with what I call the automatics, the easy stuff, but that’s a tribute to him; he took care of his footwork.

On Howell's fourth-quarter escape and deep completion to Dazz Newsome on traffic

I held my breath on that one. I think he would probably not make that one again, but you go into any game and you’re going to find a play like that on both sides of the ball that wind up going your way. I credit Dazz, it was great focus on the ball to catch that through the screening of the defensive player that really had a good shot at it. Sam has made plays on his feet; he does it in practice, he did it all of camp and a couple of those plays were big plays on Saturday.

On why he and running backs coach Robert Gillespie signal plays

It cuts out the middleman. I don’t have to call down to somebody on a headset and give them a call and they make the signal. For me, if I’m in the middle of a signal or Gillespie is in the middle of a signal and we want to stop it, we can do it right there and cut it and give them another call. It just cuts out the middleman and makes it faster and the communication is coming straight from the playcaller and I think that makes it easier.

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