Talking offense with Tim Lappano
Published 3:53 pm Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Tuesday means interviews with offensive players and coaches, and as always, Tim Lappano spent some time with reporters talking about the state of the offense.
On the game last year in which the Huskies rushed for 388 yards:
“The thing I remember from a year ago is we didn’t do very well in the red zone. I think we kicked two field goals down in there. Got a little stubborn with the run. We’ve got to convert and cash in and score touchdowns. For a team that had 380 yards rushing and 540 yards of offense, we didn’t score enough points. We’re going to have to score more points in this game.”
“That’s something we’re trying to make our players aware of, we’re going to have to start scoring points.”
Who were some of the younger guys you liked last week?
“I still like [tailback Brandon] Yakaboski. I think Yak’s doing good job. I thought he did some nice things.”
“I’m going to throw a name out at you today – they call him The Turbo, but Terrence Dailey can run the football. He’s giving our team a lot of enjoyment when the young guys go at it because he’s tearing it up. He can make you miss. He’s 200 pounds and can run the power. He’s got tremendous “avoid.” He runs physical and gets behind his pads. He’s just a good runner – inside, outside. When he first came here he tried to bounce everything and he had a little success against the freshmen. He’s found out at this level you can’t always get it going horizontally. He’s become efficient and learning to square up downhill. He’s doing some good things. I’m not convinced it’s going to be a redshirt year for him by any means. We’re going to have to make a decision here pretty quick, but if you’re asking who did a lot of good things last week, he did a lot of good things last week. He’s a runner.”
Lappano also mentioned freshmen receivers Cody Bruns and Anthony Boyles as guys who are getting better, but said a decision on whether or not to play them and other freshmen needs to come soon:
“I wouldn’t rule them out right now. I think pretty soon it’s going to be time to either put the shirt on them or play them, but right now they’ve got our eye. We’re going to have to make a decision about those guys maybe by the end of the week.”
“We were really high on Cody early, then he got hurt. Sometimes when you get hurt, you lose some ground and that’s what happened to him, but I think Cody is a good football player.”
Will last year’s game against Stanford help you guys build confidence to get the running game going?
“Yeah it does. It’s not going to go away that we rushed for 388 yards against Stanford, but at the same point and time, in this business it’s what have you done for me lately? And we haven’t done it lately, and we have to do it. Can we do it? Yeah, but we have to go out and do it. Last year was great, we did a good job, but this is a new year and we’ve got to go out and put it together. Now’s a good time to do it.”
What does FB Luke Kravitz bring to the table?
“It started a year ago when we were disastrous on third-and-short, and even the year before that. God we struggled, it was ugly. This year we’re 100 percent, knock on wood, on third down. We’re doing a really good job, we’re leading the Pac-10 in third-down conversions and third-and-short we’re 100 percent. We were searching for that guy, we tried Johnie, we tried a lot of guys. We tried Louis getting his pads down, and finally we went with Luke a year ago and he started doing some things in that role last year. He’s 240 pounds, he played running back in high school and was pretty good. He’s got some nifty feet, I think he knows how to get behind his pads. He doesn’t always see the field as well as I’d like him to, but he’s a guy when he hits you he can move you a little bit, and since he’s been doing this, we’ve been pretty good on third-and-short in the last half of last season and right now this year, it’s working.”
Tough early schedule, have guys responded well?
“It was a tough road and we knew that, and I think we gave effort in all the games. Obviously we didn’t play well at all in the Oregon game. I thought we played extremely hard in the BYU game, and in the second half [against Oklahoma]—and at that point in time, the game was over, we all knew that—and we just challenged their pride and wanted to get better and we did that. We scored a couple of times and moved the ball really pretty well against a great defense.”
“So I think that you can’t say it’s the start of a new season, but it really kind of is for us. We only had the Pac-10 opener down at Oregon and we’ve got the whole Pac-10 with us. I really believe that USC is obviously the established team and by far the front-runner in our league, and I think the rest of us are really similar, including Stanford and us and Washington State. All of us. There’s a lot of parity in this league right now. Whether this league is good, great or excellent, it doesn’t matter. There’s a lot of parity in this league right now and a lot people can win a lot of games in this league. Our players watch, and I think they’re very much aware of what happened last week and all the beatings we took in this league, and you’ve got to think they get confident watching that stuff and know that we’re that close to being right there. It all has got to start Saturday night here.”
Do you as coaches talk to them about that?
“Absolutely. This is kind of the new beginning for them. We’ve got to come out and we’ve got to win a football game and gain some confidence and momentum and just take them one at a time. And we’re going to have to go down a win a road game. Every game is a must win game. We backed ourselves into a corner. We’re sitting here at 0-3, we’ve backed ourselves into a corner, and we’ve got to come out swinging, fighting, biting, scratching, clawing, we’ve got to do whatever it takes to get this thing going. We know that, our players are aware of that. It still comes down to execution and making plays.”
