Gundy Looks Ahead to Conference Opener at Iowa State
Gundy Looks Ahead to Conference Opener at Iowa State
STILLWATER – Mike Gundy met with the media Monday in Stillwater to review the Cowboys’ loss to South Alabama and look ahead to the conference opener at Iowa State. Here are some of his comments:
Head Coach Mike Gundy
Opening Statement:
“Injury-wise we’re doing good. Obviously, Stribling goes out of the game (against South Alabama), but he should progress fine this week. Quarterback-wise we’re rotating them along as we have. There’s not really anything to talk about that would make a difference. We need to do a better job up front and we struggled protection-wise in this game, we struggled penalty-wise and we struggled special teams-wise. Those are the things that I’ve talked about a lot in preseason – your hidden yards, which is your special team return yards and being comparable to the other team. Your penalty yards and then turnovers. We lost in all three of those categories. In most cases, that will generally end up being a loss for your team and unfortunately, that’s what happened Saturday night. Defensively, we did tackle better in that game. They got their backs against the wall. To be quite honest after watching the tape, we weren’t that far off. Think one of the biggest issues is they were on the field the whole game. We couldn’t get anything going on offense or get back on the field. Overall, we got a few things we’ve got to get cleaned up. Team attitude is good. Most of them were hanging around here yesterday, even though we were off, so they’ll all be over here today for meetings and practice. Coaches are back at it and will be ready to roll.”
On defensive coordinator Bryan Nardo:
“He’s been good. He’s been good at understanding what’s going on. He has answers when it happens. He knows what’s happening. He knows you’re going to get it sometimes, they’re going to get you, you’re going to get them back and forth. If something happens, there hasn’t been a time that I’ve heard he doesn’t know what the answer is and then where we tried to get it stopped. There was quite a bit of adjustment in the latter part of the second quarter, third quarter, and fourth quarter for what we did on defense to slow them down. Some things that we hadn’t planned on doing that we adjusted on the run, in which he did a good job.”
On how the offense has adjusted:
“Well, we’ve made good adjustments. We’ve been a better running team in the second half than we have been in the first half. We didn’t have a chance this game because we were too far behind, because if you run the ball with a running clock now, you’re just going to run out of time. The math of the clock versus being down three scores is going to work against you. That’s what happened to us.”
On what he sees in Iowa State:
“The same thing that they’ve been in the past. They’re really good on defense. They’re going to do what they do. They’re a 13-personnel team on offense. They’re going to do what they do. They’re going to run counters. They’re going to run zones. They’re going to run play-pass, try to suck you in and get the ball thrown out there. They’re a wall-punt return team. They are what they are and have been for years.”
On familiarity with ISU after changing to an odd-man front this season:
“We’re not identical in what we do, but there are similarities. We come in with some of the odd-man front that they’ve seen, they come in with some odd-man front that we’ve seen. There’ll be more similarities in this game than in the times we’ve played against Coach Campbell.”
