Quick Hits: Possible Personnel Changes, Defensive Issues, Current Mindset + More
The confidence level of the team
"Negativity is never good, but hey, it is what it is. This is big-time football. There's pros and cons to it. The thing is, is if you're affected by outside noise now, you're going to be affected your whole life. You try to teach them life lessons along the way and this is it. Our message when we came back on Sunday was we've got to have a singular focus. When you have adversity two things happen. You either come together and you really learn from it and you grow from it and you look back and say hey, that's where we really got the thing turned. Or it splinters. So it's up to us, everybody that's in the program right now to really draw near and get better."
How to get better defensively
"I was extremely frustrated during the game and watching it. If you look over the years, we've played defense at a high level, in my opinion. We've been able to stop the run. This hasn't been an issue that's shown up a lot. The other night, we didn't do a very good job defensive line-wise keeping guys off our linebackers. We had a ton of free hitters on our linebackers. Our linebackers did a poor job of getting too close to the line of scrimmage and not being able to get to their responsibility in the option game. And we did an extremely poor job of getting aligned and adjusted to shifts and motions. It's not a bunch of major adjustments. It's a whole lot of small things that led to a bad performance. And we've got to work on our one-on-one tackling."
Playing younger guys
"We'll look at some personnel things. Sean Martin deserves to play more at defensive end. He will play more. Maybe even start in the game. I think we need to look at some things from a linebacker standpoint, where we're playing people. And we need to get some young guys [some playing time]. Jacolby Spells, Mumu [Bin-Wahad]. Some of those young guys that are talented, they deserve the opportunity to play."
"We're going to get them ready. They need to play. Mumu is going to play more at safety probably rather than corner. Jacolby is going to play more at corner. We're going to get those guys ready to play. They're talented. It's our job to get them ready. They've got to take care of preparation and do a better job and earning trust in practice, but they need to play."
Injury updates
"Charles Woods, he'll be out again this week. [We'll] have a better feel maybe later in the week what he looks like long-term-wise. Jalen [Thornton] will miss this game. Hopefully, get him back next Thursday. We'll know more how he kind of handles the next two days. Jordan White will be back. We anticipate him being full go and we think [Tirek] Austin-Cave will be able to play this week."
Cornerback play
"Rashad [Ajayi], he's given up a couple passes but I'm not disappointed with how he's played. He's right there. They made a really nice catch on a post ball and then he gave up one ball against Pitt. But he's played well. We can win with how he's playing. [Wesley] McCormick played much better after having to sit in the first half. We feel good about those two guys. And I think Jacolby Spells and [Andrew] Wilson-Lamp can do that. We haven't played good enough at that position, so we're going to give guys some opportunities."
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