Coach Weis is expected to announce any late changes to the depth chart today during his press conference.

Charlie Weis Press Conference Transcript - Nevada Game Preview (Sept. 1)

Sept. 1, 2009

COACH WEIS: Good afternoon. We’re finally to the real game week. We’re excited to get going against a formidable opponent, Nevada. They’ve been to four straight Bowl games, return seven guys on offense and seven guys on defense, as well as a kick return guy.

(Nevada head) coach (Chris) Ault has been there forever. He is Nevada football. He’s been coaching there for 25 years and is the winningest coach in school history.

Their offense and Coach Klenakis is what gets all the notoriety. The stats that they’ve thrown out there are kind of overwhelming. Last year they averaged 38 points a game, rushed for 278 and over 6.0 yards a carry. And on top of that, they threw for another 231 per game game. So they had over 508 yards per game on offense last year.

And it starts with their skill people, especially their quarterback. You know, Colin Kaepernick was the WAC player last year, and there’s only been five quarterbacks in Division I history that have thrown for 2,000 yards and rushed for a 1,000 yards in one season. That’s in the history of college football. And he’s one of them.

He’s got good size. He’s 6’6″. He moves deceptively well for a guy that’s that tall. He’s not afraid to tuck and run it obviously with the yardage he gets. On top of that, what makes him more dangerous is their stable of running backs. I’ll mention two of them now. I’ll come back to another one later.

We can talk about Vai Taua and Luke Lippincott as their main two guys. Lippincott had been the starter and got hurt, but he’s coming back for his sixth year where Taua took over last year and averaged over 118 yards rushing per game. I’m going to talk about the freshman here in a couple of minutes, but that gives them two formidable running backs right off the back.

At receiver, the most experienced receiver is Chris Wellington, but it looks like he’s not even going to start. So that means they’re pretty fired up with their younger guys. L.J. Washington over Wellington as a starter and Malcolm Shepherd as a starter at X.

Brandon Wimberly is a guy who has been banged up in camp, had been in camp some, and he’s a contender at that same position and they’ve got Tray Session playing in the slot.

Coming out of camp, we’ve been studying their personnel a lot. For example, the tight end position most people have one or two that they like. They like four of them. Virgil Green is their starter. He’s a former wide receiver. If they want more of the blocking tight end, they could play Kevin Bohr. They could play Bohr or Talaiasi Puloka.

And looking at their last scrimmage, the last game scrimmage they had, none of those guys are the guys who caught two touchdowns in the last scrimmage. That was Zach Sudfeld.

So coming out of camp, I think they feel pretty good about their tight end position. And they use a lot of tight ends in their offense as well as wide receivers. Returned three starters on their offensive line, starting with Alonzo Durham weak side tackle. Mike Gallet, strong side tackle, returning starter as well. They have John Bender and Chris Barker and Kenneth Ackerman inside. Bender and Barker handle the strong side and weak side guards, along with Ackerman in the middle.

Going over to defense and Coach Burton, what they’ve been able to do very well is stop the run. They gave up 88 yards rushing per game last year, but translate that into a better stat, they only allowed 3.1 rushing yards per attempt last year.

On top of that, they’ve got two dynamic defensive ends that totaled just under 20 sacks and 36 tackles per loss last year with Kevin Basped and Dontay Moch. Little different players, Basped has more size. He’s 6’6″. Moch is actually a little faster, to tell you the truth. They’ve got two guys that can come off the edge. And anytime you have two guys that come off the edge on defense, you’re dangerous in the pass rush. That’s one thing when you’ve got one of them, but they have two of them. Inside, Nate Agaiava, he’s a returning starter who plays inside. And it looks like – Zack Madonick has won the starting job as the other inside defensive tackle.

Both their outside linebackers returned. Brandon Marshall at Will, which they call Wolf. And James-Michael Johnson. I watched a lot of him at Sam linebacker, because he’s very athletic, and I watched him last year as a redshirt freshman. One thing, when you play a team early in the year, you get to watch all the games from the previous year without being rushed. And as the year went on, he just got better and better. But although he didn’t start at Mike linebacker, he played a whole bunch. I think they have to feel pretty confident there.

This is also a time of year where you have to be very sharp for number changes. Because there’s guys that wear one number last year and then they moved to another number as they transition.

I’ll give you two examples. Their nickel back is Kevin Grimes. If you watched tape last year, he’s wearing No. 20. But this year he’s wearing No. 31. They also have a defense where they have a walk around guy at the line of scrimmage, and a nickel, once again substituted defensive set, and last year that was Joe Easter. He was wearing 22. But this year he’s wearing No. 53.

I think it’s very important when you’re studying these early games, not only just to study the roster and their depth chart, but also to study the guys you’re watching on tape. You say, well, that number 53, that was 22 last year. So the players can translate that when they’re doing their film study.

Two of their defensive backs Jonathon Amaya at free safety and Antoine Thompson at their boundary corner return. Amaya was their strong safety last year that they moved back to free safety, put Mo Harvey in at strong safety who played a lot of corner and safety for them last year. And Isaiah Frey, to tell you the truth, who starts at the other corner, he played a whole bunch as a true freshman as well. So I think they’re pretty content with where they are in the secondary as far as experience goes.

Now, Coach Sacks is their defensive end coach, special teams coach, and you’re going to hear a lot of Richard Drake. Because Drake is going to kick off for them, going to kick field goals for them. If Brad Langley who is coming off an Achilles, if he’s not ready to go, Drake might be the punter, too. But if Langley is ready to go, he’ll handle the punting duties which Jared Silva Purcell is the long snapper.

Now at kick return, I mention I was going to talk about a freshman, Michael Ball, who is one of the two kick returners, along with Wimberly, has had a very, very good camp for them. All reports are that the kid’s a stud running back. And I think that they’re going to try to get him on field as fast as they can. The only problem for Mike Ball is you’ve got two veterans ahead of them that are pretty darned good players. And Taua looks like will be handling their punt returning chores.

BRIAN HARDIN: Questions.

Q. Looking over the depth chart, I think what jumped out at me was the left side of the offensive line, there’s a couple of “or”s there. Where are you at those?

COACH WEIS: Paul Duncan will start at left tackle. Matt Romine will play in the game. Chris Stewart will start at left guard but Dan Wenger will definitely play in the game. Usually when you put offensive linemen in they’re going to stay in for the whole time but those two guys are two guys that we want to make sure we get involved in the game in the first half. We’re not going to wait to the second half to get Romine and Wenger in the game.

So Duncan and Stewart will both start but both Romine and Wenger will show up respectively at the left tackle, left guard position.

Q. I think Jonas Gray moving up to the No. 2 spot, talk about how he did that?

COACH WEIS: First of all, he had a good camp. Second of all, Robert Hughes can’t play in the first half anyway. He’s coming off suspension from the USC game, because he got in a fight in the second half of the game. So, we lose Robert for the first half of this game.

That being said, Jonas has earned being there. He had a heck of a camp. Makes it a little easier to make that decision when you know you don’t have the other guy available for play until the second half comes around.

Q. Coach, you talked about Kaepernick. One of your players this week stopped just short of comparing him to Vince Young. Any similarities to the two, or anybody else you would compare him to?

COACH WEIS: I think that the style of offense that these guys use is a little bit unique. It’s not like Navy. But there’s Navy elements. It’s not like Texas with Vince Young, when Texas is running, when they’re really running the shotgun offense with offset backs, but it has elements of it.

So I think the analogy of Vince Young is looking at the things that Texas was asking Vince Young to do. I think there are a lot of things they ask Kaepernick to do that are similar but from a different formation.

The unique part in Nevada’s offense is the fact that they don’t lose their downhill plays, their straight downhill plays. Although the quarterback is in the shotgun, the back’s still behind the quarterback. So it still gives you the element of being able to run all your normal I formation type plays without having to have an offset back.

Q. Can you talk about Nevada’s experience in the secondary. They obviously struggled last year.

COACH WEIS: First thing, when you have experienced players, it usually allows you to settle down and do more things. And I think as you look at that philosophically we’ll know relatively early in the game how they intend to fix that.

I know Coach Ault spent a lot of time along with the defensive staff in the offseason simplifying things on defense so they can get ready to just turn those guys loose up front and let the guys in the back just handle the coverage.

So whether they stick with the same coverages they’ve showed last year or tweak them, you know, it’s the first game, you’ve got to be ready for just about everything. But they have a good coaching staff and I’m sure they’ll adjust accordingly.

Q. There’s always from the media standpoint with young players, we start promoting them during the preseason. You have Robby Parris as a number two wide receiver, what did he do during camp to earn that job?

COACH WEIS: Well, Robby has been the guy since last spring, to be honest with you. There was a lot of time when Robby kind of carried the torch for the wide receivers. Michael Floyd was banged up. Golden Tate was playing baseball. Duval Kamara was banged up. And the one who separated himself from everyone during last spring was Robby. So now going into this camp, you’re just waiting for one of the young guys to go by him and they didn’t go by him.

And that doesn’t mean we don’t have those young receivers all waiting in the wings to get on the field and we won’t play them, it just means going into this game right now I think that one of the most dependable guys we have other than the two that everybody talks about with Michael and Golden, Robby is the most consistent player we have out there.

Q. Have you established a rotation? Is it a four man rotation or does it go deeper than that?

COACH WEIS: I think we’d go as deep as seven. But right now let’s start with four and we’ll go from there. Obviously there’s — each one of these guys, and, for example, I could talk about Shaquelle Evans, and I can talk about John Goodman and talk about Deion Walker. I could talk about all those guys and the roles they play here, but in all cases they’re still in back up roles. Whereas, Robbie and Duval will almost certainly be on the field a lot more than the rest of the troops. All those guys have roles that they play.

Q. I promised I wouldn’t ask a health-related question this year, but do you feel confident that your knees are good enough that you’ll be coaching all the games from the sidelines here?

COACH WEIS: I’ll be honest with you, Tim, right now I can’t answer that question about ten games from now. But I can tell you right now it’s not an issue.

My knees feel as good as they felt since the hit. I mean, they feel as good as they possibly could. I was in that tub again this morning going and putting my couple miles in there, and they feel as good as they’re going to feel until I get the other knee done.

Q. Last year, seemed pretty obvious, passing attack was the weak part of their defense. Talk about the need to run this year. Do you have to establish the run no matter what in this kind of game?

COACH WEIS: Score it however you can. If they go into the game and stop the run and we need to throw, we’ll throw. But what we’d like to do, what we’d like to do, if you’re asking me the game plan and tell Coach Ault what we’d like to do, we’d like to throw it half of the time and run it half of the time. That’s what we’d like to do.

But I don’t know how it’s going to play out. I don’t know what adjustments or tweaks they could make. I know statistically you look at their run defense versus their pass defense and you can put a silver lining either way you want to. If you want to, you could say, well, they gave up a lot of yards passing because everyone realized they couldn’t run the ball against them.

Or you could say the reason why no one had any stats running against them because they throw against them the whole time. It all depends on which way you want to look at it. But I do know they move a lot up front with stunts on their run defense and it will be pretty formidable to run against. I think we have a pretty good plan for what we’re going to do against them. At the same time, we’re going to do whatever we have to do to score touchdowns.

Q. Can you tell us a little how you think Armando Allen is better this year, what he’s learned and what is he doing better?

COACH WEIS: I think of two major factors. I’m expecting a banner year from Armando, expecting big things from Armando. First thing is he’s stronger. We talk about size. There are a lot of guys under 200 pounds that have illustrious careers in college or the pros. They’ve all been strong. Armando is a strong person for his 200 pounds.

Secondly, he’s much more experienced. And with experience you have much more confidence. He knows what to do. He’s one of the players on our team that I have tons of confidence.

Q. You mentioned Jonas Gray earned his spot. Can you talk about what he’s done, what he’s shown you to earn that?

COACH WEIS: His three biggest negatives going into the offseason and into this year were, A, better understanding of what we’re doing offensively. So he understood blitz pick up and all those other things.

And, B, not cutting back every time he got the ball, because he was a cutback runner by nature in high school; and, C, taking care of the football. Those were the three issues that he really had to address, because last year during his freshman year they were the three areas where he had the most difficulty.

And those three areas have shown significant improvement. In all three of them, they’ve shown significant improvement.

Q. The kickoff return situation, what did Theo Riddick do to kind of work his way up there?

COACH WEIS: Theo is one of those guys who has kind of got everyone’s attention from the first day he’s gotten here athletically. And to be honest with you, on kickoff return we’d like to get the ball in his hands as much as we could, because we think when he touches the ball there’s an opportunity of him taking it to the house.

And anytime we can save Armando or save Golden from having to be back there, and have somebody that has the same type of ability with the ball in his hands, you know it’s a win win situation for us.

Q. How has Evan Sharpley been doing kind of imitating Colin Kaepernick?

COACH WEIS: He’s the runaway winner for the scout team player of the week this week. Put it this way, we haven’t even started this week’s practice and I’ll already tell you he’ll be the scout team player of the week. Because if last week was any indication, I mean he did a great job. And the defensive players, when you get them, you might want to ask them that question yourself, because he’s giving a lot of headaches.

Q. Following up on the kickoff returns. Can you talk about James Aldridge’s presence there, and are you going to use all four of those guys?

COACH WEIS: We’ll start with James and Theo. And then we’ll go from there. I think the last thing I wanted to do is put Shaq and Theo back there for the first kickoff return of the year.

I don’t think I would have felt too comfortable having those two guys. But having James back there, it’s kind of a settling influence. When James gets the ball, he’ll do well with it. If James doesn’t get the ball, he’ll make the decisions for Theo. So Theo doesn’t have to make the decisions, and we’ll go from there.

Q. With Darrin Walls flip-flopping with Raeshon McNeil, was it a matter of Darrin missing so much time?

COACH WEIS: I think Darrin’s right there. I could have very easily just put it as “or” and that’s probably the way it’s going to play out. I wouldn’t read too much into Raeshon being ahead of Darrin. I think you’ll see them both on the field. It’s just that Darrin was limited really for a week and a half and Raeshon was getting all those reps and Darrin was hardly getting any.

So I wouldn’t — like I said I could have very easily put an “or” in that situation, but because we’re going to start Raeshon, I just put Raeshon down there first.

Q. In conversations with Kapron Lewis-Moore, it seems as though he does not even realize maybe how good he can be?

COACH WEIS: Well, that sort of comes from not playing last year. It’s been two years now for him. It’s been a long time since he’s played a game for real, since his high school season ended.

So it’s been quite some time. I think he’s just really excited to be out there and not running show team. Now it’s playing against somebody different. And getting an opportunity to play a game because against this team right here, if you don’t do your job, regardless of your level of experience, you don’t do your job and you open a hole for them, you could get burned.

I’m really excited to see Kapron play. I think he’ll do just fine.

Q. I would imagine as the offensive coordinator, that’s not a subtle difference from play caller, can you talk about maybe what you like about this new role?

COACH WEIS: It’s a significant difference. People don’t understand as an offensive coordinator you have to be there for absolutely everything, for everything from the beginning of the film study to writing the openers.

You can’t all of a sudden say I have an 11:00 meeting with the AD. You can’t do that. I mean, you’re with the coaches all day and then you’re with the players until they leave, and then you get to be the head coach at nighttime after they’re gone.

So it just extends your day some. Like I said, the start of my day will never change, but it’s extended the day some, but I think my wife is sick of me by now anyway. So probably good it extended it some.

Q. On a more general note, how important would a fast start be for these guys?

COACH WEIS: It’s important to us and it’s important to them, too. This is a team coming in, they’re flying into South Bend, taking the team to the College Football Hall of Fame. This is almost like a Bowl game for them.

I envision the game going just the way we envision it. I think you’re playing at home, you’re playing against a formidable opponent. If we can come out and play really well right off the bat, it could set a good precedent as we go forward.

Q. And Manti Te’o, can you talk about how you can use him?

COACH WEIS: Manti will definitely be on the field. We won’t start him. We won’t start him, but I think you’ll see him rotating in there, rotating in there at Will linebacker with Brian Smith or Toryan Smith.

It’s the same as the question before about kick returners. I wouldn’t feel real confident with Manti being in there with an inexperienced player. I think at this point right now he won’t rotate what he plays, but if he’s in there with Brian, Brian will pop over to Mike; and if he’s in there with Toryan, Toryan will just stay where he is.

I think now we’ve gotten a lot more numbers. We have 83 guys on scholarship. I mean, it’s a lot different for coach Brian Polian because he has a lot more volume of players to choose from. Two positions you’re always looking for are safety types and linebacker types. And in the past we didn’t have a lot of backup safeties and backup linebackers that were good special teams players.

Well, now, you can run down them: Sergio Brown, Ray Herring, Zeke Motta, Dan McCarthy. Go over to the linebacker: Steve Filer, Scott Smith. I’m talking forget about even using the starters right now. Manti, Anthony McDonald, David Posluszny.

Now all of a sudden those safety/linebacker types that we didn’t have a lot of those type of guys that we would be able to use for, now we’ve got a whole bunch of them. Makes Brian’s job a little easier to get some quality people in there at quality positions.

Q. Have you locked down a possible replacement for David Bruton at one of the gunner spots?

COACH WEIS: We’ll have to wait on that one until Saturday.

Q. We’ve heard from some outraged ND fans about the billboard that’s gone up near campus. And it says “Best wishes to Charlie Weis in his fifth year of his college coaching internship.”

COACH WEIS: I really don’t. Everything was great until the last word. So tell them thanks a lot for wishing me best wishes. I heard about it. I haven’t seen it. We’ll just leave it at that. But sounds pretty good. Just take that last word out and we’re all set.

Q. Talk a little more about Kaepernick and what he does. As far as his freakish numbers, just preparing for two quarterbacks in one?

COACH WEIS: The first thing is, the running backs are good. And it always makes your quarterback’s job, when the runners are running as well as these two guys are and the freshman, now all of a sudden if you’re selling out to stop those guys, now before you know it he’s on the edge. So that’s the vulnerability you have with a scheme like this. It’s not just him. He’s a darn good player. But I think in Coach Ault’s scheme, if you don’t stop the run first, don’t stop the inside run, you have a problem.

Okay. If you worry about just Kaepernick, okay, then they’re going to be gashing you inside. So before you even get to the passing game, you’ve got two major concerns: You’ve got a quarterback that’s not afraid to run it and has run it for a lot of yards. And you have a stable of running backs that have all shown to be pretty good and getting pressed by a young guy on top of it.

Q. Considering how the bowl game went, had to be a better offseason?

COACH WEIS: It made it easier to get through January, February and March and April. But still the bottom line is we get ready for this opener, we’ve kind of stuck to the same mantra. This isn’t like T shirt material, this is just what we’ve been doing. We’ve been saying this is the year for us to stop talking about it and let’s see if we can start doing something about it.

And I think that our players, I think that’s what they’re ready for. They want to go out there and play at home and have some fun. And the only way you’re having some fun is if good things are happening.

Q. That said, do you sense with Jimmy Clausen this year that maybe he’s got a little bit of a chip on his shoulder because so many people say: Was the Hawaii game just a one time thing or is that something that he can continue?

COACH WEIS: Why don’t you ask Mark Beuhrle if he liked pitching a perfect game? I think he’ll take that perfect game anytime of the week. I think when you’re 22 for 26 with four dropped balls, you can’t play any better than that.

But the best thing from a coach’s perspective, especially now that I’m the offensive coordinator, is, okay, there’s the best you can play. Can’t play any better than that. Won’t make it much different. Your stats aren’t going to get much better than that ever. But that’s what you have to shoot for on a week in, week out basis.

Because we all have evidence that we’ve seen that happen, that’s what he’s shooting for on a weekly basis. Starting with me.

Q. You mentioned Evan, the success he’s had against the defense running on the scout team in the pistol. When you look at that offense, or any other offense, do you sometimes say: Hey, there are elements from that that I’d like to incorporate at some point with my offense?

COACH WEIS: Well, the truth to the matter is there are elements that are very similar already. The only difference is they’re during the shotgun. I don’t think we’re going to be running the option with Jimmy. I don’t think he’s going to be coming down the line of scrimmage and faking off to Armando and coming down the end there. I think that they can safely assume that we probably will not be doing that.

But with that being said, more than answering it could we use elements of it, you look at the things that they actually do that really you could translate into what we do, just from a different point where the guys on the shotgun with their backs standing behind them.

Q. You talked about some players specifically being excited to get an opportunity to play. And I’m curious about you, long offseason between recruiting and camp and everything that goes into this. Are you excited for this Saturday to be so close now?

COACH WEIS: I love game weeks. I love game weeks. Probably my least favorite week of the entire year was last week, because you’re going through everything like it’s a game but there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, there’s no game. Now it’s game week. So it makes it the energy level in practice as high as it was last week. We’ll go up twice as much this week because now they know come Saturday at 3:42 or 3:43 we’ll be doing it for real.

Q. That’s where I was going next. Do you even need to do anything this week to generate that enthusiasm or will it automatically happen?

COACH WEIS: No, we have a whole different set — a whole different set of things to plan for the fellas today. We’re going to have an offense versus defense full speed period right early in the practice. As soon as we get rid of a certain group of people, okay, we’ll be having a full speed offense versus defense practice.

To get everyone’s attention. Go over the speed of the game and get everyone’s attention and then that will kind of be a wakeup call to get everyone going. That will be the fourth individual, by the way.

Q. Interested in moving that up?

COACH WEIS: No, it’s planned. (Laughter).

Q. Good morning. I’ve got a few if I may. I was curious if you could address a little bit about how you keep your guys from looking past a game like this?

COACH WEIS: Well, if you watch this team on tape, it’s actually pretty easy, to tell you the truth. Sometimes when you’re watching a team, you don’t have enough evidence — you don’t have enough evidence on tape. And it’s a tough sell where you’re getting up in front of your team and you’re trying to say how tough a team, how tough a game it’s going to be, how tough a game it’s going to be. But there’s plenty evidence on tape with this team right here.

When you’re watching those two defensive ends sack guys 20 times, have another 36 tackles for loss, that’s just at the defensive end position, that gets your attention. And you watch them go up and down the field against everyone on offense, that gets your attention.

So I think that we’ve had very little problem getting the players’ attention because I think that this team is pretty darn good.

Q. I know he doesn’t play much, but he’s a local guy. Could you talk about Chris Gurries? And if my knowledge is correct, he was just two of about 100 walk-on guys to make the team that year.

COACH WEIS: Let me tell you something about Gurries. He’s one of my favorite guys on this team. No one knows him because he’s a walk on player. But he’s also one of the brightest kids on our team. He has just about a 4.0 every semester here. Comes to work every single day and he has some athleticism.

So I have no remorse about saying positive things about Gurries. As a matter of fact, everyday I make sure I go out of my way to bust his chops because we have this little — he would almost feel bad if I didn’t say something to him on a daily basis. But he’s a good kid. He’s a hard worker. He’s got some ability. And he’s a great student on top of it.

Q. Do you see him playing much for you at all?

COACH WEIS: If I could get him on the field in this game, I would get him on the field in this game. But I think that he knows his role. His role is to help us on the show teams to get ready to go.

Q. There’s a lot of talk in the national media you being on the hot seat this year. Do you pay any attention to that? What are your thoughts regarding that?

COACH WEIS: I’m the head coach at Notre Dame. Welcome to my world. That comes with the territory of being head coach at Notre Dame. When you take this job that’s part that comes with it.

Right now we’re just trying to beat Nevada. That’s the only thing on our mind. I could not care less about any other things but beating Nevada. That’s all I want to do. I’m not worried about hot seats, cold seats, anything. I’m just worrying about trying to beat Nevada.

Q. (Question about quarterback Jimmy Clausen’s progress)?

COACH WEIS: I think I’m most pleased with his progress from the end of last season to right now. I think that the first year, the first year was kind of a “get through the year”-type year.

The second year he grew into more understanding of what a college quarterback is. And I think where he went from let’s say the USC game last year, which when we decided we were going to really start the next year, from that time until right now, I think he’s put himself in a position to be really good. That’s what I’m expecting, I’m expecting him to be really, really good.

Q. Do you anticipate it from him? Is this sort of the time line you would have thought for him to kind of have that?

COACH WEIS: I think maybe if he came in another year where he had a veteran team around him, you know, in his early years, maybe you could have just handed off a whole bunch of times and thrown it minimal times.

But when you’re having a tough year and you’re throwing it a whole bunch that’s really throwing it to the wolves somewhat. But I think that right now, I think that things are in place for the arrow to be pointing up in a lot of different directions.

Q. In light of the accusations in Ann Arbor, how does your program monitor the time spent doing football related activities during the week?

COACH WEIS: It’s actually pretty easy here because of our relationship with compliance. Our kids don’t get out of school until 2:00. So we don’t see them in the building until 2:15. So it’s kind of tough for — unless somebody’s coming over — we have our training room guys that kind of like hanging out in the training room every day. When you turn around they have a different ice bag on. But if they don’t have a class they have an ice bag.

But other than those training room guys, we don’t see any of the players until 2:15 in the afternoon. And between 2:15 and 6:45, we have four hours of meetings and a half hour to get dressed. Because from there they’ve got to eat dinner and go to study hall. So there isn’t a lot of time here. You run a tight clock. It’s a tight clock. Time management is tough enough as it is for these guys.

Q. I guess it’s probably easier to monitor during the season, but what about during the summer?

COACH WEIS: I mean, during the summer, I don’t understand how anything could really happen. The coaches can’t be involved during the summer. And they get — they run and lift on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. And run and lift usually takes from an hour and a half to two hours. That’s what it is.

I don’t understand — I don’t know how everyone else does it, but that’s what we do here, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, they run and lift. I mean, how many hours can you run and lift for? Usually takes about an hour and a half two hours.

Q. The things they do on their own individually?

COACH WEIS: What they want to do — and I couldn’t even tell you how many times they go out and throw, I couldn’t even tell you the answer to that. And I couldn’t tell you who is there and who is not there. I couldn’t even give you the answer to that. We don’t give them anything. They don’t have playbooks or anything. This isn’t about defending Notre Dame. I don’t know what anyone else does, I just know what we do. And I think that it’s pretty easy to just stick to the plan that everyone has and that’s what you would expect it to have.

BRIAN HARDIN: Thank you.

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