Nov. 9, 2014

An Interview With:

COACH Brian Kelly

Q. Coach, I know that you went over a lot of the stuff with Everett yesterday. I just wondered, between then and now, what have you said to him and do you feel like this is something that’s fixable with him?
COACH KELLY: Oh, we haven’t met yet. They come over for dinner. They had treatment this morning, and we’ll get a chance to sit down and talk.

Absolutely. I mean, look, there is clearly a number of things that we’ve got to clean up, and in a game where the turnovers decided the game, there are things that we can do better as coaches. We’ve got to be able to I think the biggest thing for me is we’ve got to take care of the careless mistakes. There are going to be some mistakes made within the structure of our offense, but they can’t be careless. Then we’ve got to do a great job of putting him in a good position, and that’s on me as a coach.

So we’ve got some work to do to clean it up. But all of them are definitely things that we’ll go to work on this week to get better at.

Q. What do you see in him that gives you confidence that he is going to get this thing turned around? What in his past or what in the things that you see in practice give you that confidence?
COACH KELLY: Well, I mean, after the first 30 plays, I mean we had I think the first 35 plays we had most of all of our mistakes were made and they were all correctable mistakes. Then our next 47 plays, other than the last play of the game, the last sack there where we were trying to make a play, he’s doing really good things. So we know what he’s capable of doing. I think it’s pretty much what I said postgame. It’s striving for consistency, because we get really great batches of work. It’s really gaining that consistency for four quarters. So my eyes tell me the body of work just needs to be more consistent.

Q. How would you, now that you’ve had a chance maybe to look at Nyles Morgan’s body of work from yesterday, how would you evaluate his performance both X’s and O’s stuff and getting the communication piece?
COACH KELLY: It was what we kind of expected for a first time start from Nyles. The communication was just okay. We were hoping for some help from others that we didn’t get. We played a little tentative for his first game out there.

Q. In terms of the field goal and place kicking operation, are there any changes in store or is that something you feel like can get smoothed out with the people that you have?
COACH KELLY: Yeah, I would probably use John McKay’s line. I’m in favor of execution, executing both of them. Better execution for those two. Those are the only two guys. These guys like live with each other all summer. It’s just absolutely crazy that we can’t get a snap and catch in that situation. These two kids have been working together for a year and a half, Smith and Daly, so we don’t have a back up long snapper. These guys got to get the job done.

It was a crucial time in the game to have that kind of a mistake. So go back to the routine and continue to work on it, and hope that we don’t have that mistake again.

Q. If I read you right, a lot of times with stuff you like to be the little picture to your team more than what are you guys playing for, but with Notre Dame realistically out of the playoff picture. Do you give them a big picture to shoot for and say here’s what’s out for us, or do you just focus on improving every day?
COACH KELLY: Well, after the debacle in the desert here on offense, we have a lot to focus on just on Tuesday. So we’re going to focus on cleaning up what we need to clean up internally, offensively, defensively. So there won’t be any big picture conversations. We’ve got a lot of work to do to be better as a football team. That’s going to be the focus this week.

Q. With Cody’s injury, is it something that probably is going to linger with him the rest of the season or is there something that has a chance to get better, and he can get back to a hundred percent playing?
COACH KELLY: No, it’s a stress reaction, so it’s a hot spot. There is no fracture, but the stress fracture, he’s got inflammation and sensitivity on that foot. So rest is going to help. So this rest helps him a lot. I think it helps him get back in the lineup.

But it’s something we’re going to have to monitor the rest of the year. I think we’ll probably have to cut back a little bit in his practice and really kind of make sure that we can get him through the rest of the season.

Q. On Tuesday you issued a challenge to Will Fuller. Was that the kind of response you were looking for yesterday out of him?
COACH KELLY: Well, the challenge was really for practice. He had a very good week of practice. My challenge was essentially in letting him know that he needed to prepare better and he did. He had a good week of practice. For these younger guys that are playing in this first year of quite a bit of football, their preparation has a lot to do with how they play on Saturdays and that’s everybody.

He had a good week of practice. I could tell that he was going to perform at the level that we’ve become accustomed to. So that was really the comment that I made was more about a conversation I had with him about practicing at a better level.