UNC's Butch Davis UVA pre-game press conference quotes

Posted Tuesday, September 11, 2007

 E-mail this page    Printer-friendly page

Coach Davis' opening comments:

Chapel Hill, NC - When you a lose a ball game I think that probably the quickest to get over it is to get back to work, working on next week's opponent. We had great meetings yesterday with the players as we had a chance to go through the tapes and show the films. It's a great learning experience for young players. The best way for them to gain experience is obviously to play, but the next best way is to see themselves playing and to see how they could have done something better. Throughout the course of the season that is going to be a major mantra with us as a coaching staff to take the experience that you had from the previous week and apply that to the next opponent.

Which brings Virginia to town. Just watching the tapes, we spent about four or five hours last night and a couple hours this morning already and one thing they are considerably bigger than either of the two teams we've played. A little bit dramatically different, although they run some elements of the read option offense on offense. They spread the field awful lot and they throw the ball but they've got a power running attack that neither of the first two opponents actually had. The running back, 37 Pearman, is a big strong guy and he made a real good reputation for himself last year as a kickoff return guy. The first impression I had was actually watching special teams tapes yesterday and seeing him as the return guy and you can see him break tackles and he is big and strong. They really do use their offensive line a lot in pull schemes, they try and get the ball to the perimeter, they try and pound you and they are a big physical offensive line.

Defensively, you flip the side of the ball and they are a totally different defense than the previous two teams. Predominantly they were 4-3 concept teams this is a 3-4 concept; you can see Virginia's background from the NFL, Coach Groh having coached with Bill Parcells. There is a tremendous amount of elements of the 3-4 defense that they ran with the New York Giants. They are very fundamentally sound, they are big, physical. There linebackers are 6-2, 6-3, 6-4, 240-pound guys and they are the prototype for the 3-4 type of scheme.

Chris Long I obviously had the misfortune of times coaching against his father Howie when he was with the Oakland Raiders and you want to talk about a chip off the old block. This is a young man that plays absolutely lights out football, he is flying to the football, he is big, strong he anchors. One of the things you don't generally associate sometimes with the 3-4 defensive team is the number of sacks and in two ball games they already got nine sacks. They have an ability to put pressure on the quarterback and I'm sure that is going to be a major challenge for our offense this week is making sure that we are good in our protections.

They are sound in the kicking game, their punter is averaging 46 yards per punt already and he is kicking the ball very, very well. Their kicker on kickoff is kicking the ball routinely in the end zone and I think that is a huge part of it, which you saw witnessed by us with our kickoff coverage when the ball gets in play anything can happen. It is an area that we certainly have got to try and improve on. This week will be about us and us trying to get better, trying to bounce back emotionally and have our football team as well prepared for Virginia this Saturday as possible.

On the pass coverage against East Carolina:

You look at them and how young and inexperienced they are and they will get better and they will start to understand formations and recognition of route concepts. I think that is probably the biggest thing when you play pass defense is for any of your underneath guys, whether you are in nickel and dime packages or in your regular packages is for everybody to understand they have to do exactly what their supposed to do, don't try and go help somebody else, don't think that well the quarterback's eyes told me that they are going to run a curl and you avoid your area where you're supposed to be.

On things the team improved on:

I clearly think that we got a little bit better in the running game. I think that we made some strides. We may have not made any bigger numbers, but the people we were blocking were significantly better than they were in week two than they were in week one. I think that the quarterback has made good and wise decisions, I think that that is important. I think that we are trying to get more people involved rather than just one or two guys in the passing game as evidenced by the number of guys that caught the football. I think that those were areas of improvement. I think that our defensive line did a nice job as far as the running game was concerned. Special teams area, we wanted to get Brandon (Tate) involved and do a better job of getting him some opportunities to return some punts and he had one good kickoff return out to almost the 50-yard line, he had a punt return for a touchdown. We are making some strides, sometimes they are itty-bitty strides that sometimes go unnoticed but hopefully those little strides lead to big strides.