RobHowe
Administrator
From this morning's presser in Orlando...
You talked about you can't change the identity of the offense overnight, and you're not sure you want to. What is the ideal identity of your offense, your program's offense, and why?
BRIAN FERENTZ: Well, I think when you think about the offense, you need to think about the team, right. So, I just got done complimenting Ivory on the kind of team player he was. Our goal is simple: We want to win football games, and ultimately we are trying to compete for and win a Big Ten Championship.
We weren't able to do that this year. We came a little bit closer than we have in years past. I know offensively, you know, perhaps we haven't had the statistics or the measurables or all those things, maybe we are not that exciting.
But at the end of the day, our job is simple: We need to change field position, and we need to score points. That's really it, because we are a three-phase team: We play defense, special teams and offense. We win when all three of those phases are working together.
The identity is simple: We need to be a group that can support the team and win games, however, we need to win those games.
One thing that’s never going to change, and this is just one person's opinion, football is a physical game. I think there's two things that make football unique relative to other sports. One is the team aspect. There's not many sports, you know, all due respect to European football, but I don't understand that game particularly well.
But I know this: We share a similarity in that we have a lot of players on the field at one time, right. I'm not a big basketball fan. Very much enjoy watching ice hockey. Probably ice hockey and wrestling would be my next two. You think about those sports, wrestling, certainly an individual sport with a team element. Ice hockey is the type of sport where one player can make a very significant difference on the ice, right. If you have the best player on the ice, there's less moving pieces; he can be super involved, much like basketball, right.
Football, the team element of football, 11 pieces moving together, tremendous execution required and tremendous synergy required. That can be a huge, huge benefit. Then, when you think about team football in a further aspect, you think about the three phases working together, that makes it a unique game, right.
If you have all three phases working together, you can overcome some challenges that you have in matching up against a particular point. That's the team aspect.
And the second aspect, I know we are trying to take it out of the game desperately, but there's a physical aspect of football. And the last time I checked, on Saturday we'll be wearing full pads. We'll have shoulder pads on, helmets, pants, the thigh pads, the knee pads – maybe not the knee pads, but at least the thigh pads, right, the whole deal.
They try to create rules where we can't practice with pads on. They try to create rules where we can't practice at all. But at the end of the day, this is a physical game. And you can make up the difference perhaps between you and an opponent, you can close gaps with the togetherness of team and with the physicalness of the game.
That's what we are always going to be built on. And I think, at the end of the day, if you want to look program-wide, look, our job offensively is to fit within to that goal, but that's always going to come down to running the football. I think you measure any football team by how well they run the football, how well they stop the run, and how well they cover kicks, which speaks to the physical aspect of the game.
You look at our last game, you look at the rushing numbers, I think that bears out the result. It's going to be hard for us to win like that, right. So what we need to do, our identity is always going to be based on being physical and being able to run the football.
That doesn't mean that you're not going to do other things, right. Because you have to score points, and all of that -that's the special sauce, right. So, that's what you're trying to build every year and find the right ingredients to get to those things.
But, at the end of the day, if you're scoring points, and you have the ability to run the football when it matters, you're going to have a chance to win football games.
So when I look at big picture, macro, global thoughts, that's what we're looking at identity-wise.
You talked about you can't change the identity of the offense overnight, and you're not sure you want to. What is the ideal identity of your offense, your program's offense, and why?
BRIAN FERENTZ: Well, I think when you think about the offense, you need to think about the team, right. So, I just got done complimenting Ivory on the kind of team player he was. Our goal is simple: We want to win football games, and ultimately we are trying to compete for and win a Big Ten Championship.
We weren't able to do that this year. We came a little bit closer than we have in years past. I know offensively, you know, perhaps we haven't had the statistics or the measurables or all those things, maybe we are not that exciting.
But at the end of the day, our job is simple: We need to change field position, and we need to score points. That's really it, because we are a three-phase team: We play defense, special teams and offense. We win when all three of those phases are working together.
The identity is simple: We need to be a group that can support the team and win games, however, we need to win those games.
One thing that’s never going to change, and this is just one person's opinion, football is a physical game. I think there's two things that make football unique relative to other sports. One is the team aspect. There's not many sports, you know, all due respect to European football, but I don't understand that game particularly well.
But I know this: We share a similarity in that we have a lot of players on the field at one time, right. I'm not a big basketball fan. Very much enjoy watching ice hockey. Probably ice hockey and wrestling would be my next two. You think about those sports, wrestling, certainly an individual sport with a team element. Ice hockey is the type of sport where one player can make a very significant difference on the ice, right. If you have the best player on the ice, there's less moving pieces; he can be super involved, much like basketball, right.
Football, the team element of football, 11 pieces moving together, tremendous execution required and tremendous synergy required. That can be a huge, huge benefit. Then, when you think about team football in a further aspect, you think about the three phases working together, that makes it a unique game, right.
If you have all three phases working together, you can overcome some challenges that you have in matching up against a particular point. That's the team aspect.
And the second aspect, I know we are trying to take it out of the game desperately, but there's a physical aspect of football. And the last time I checked, on Saturday we'll be wearing full pads. We'll have shoulder pads on, helmets, pants, the thigh pads, the knee pads – maybe not the knee pads, but at least the thigh pads, right, the whole deal.
They try to create rules where we can't practice with pads on. They try to create rules where we can't practice at all. But at the end of the day, this is a physical game. And you can make up the difference perhaps between you and an opponent, you can close gaps with the togetherness of team and with the physicalness of the game.
That's what we are always going to be built on. And I think, at the end of the day, if you want to look program-wide, look, our job offensively is to fit within to that goal, but that's always going to come down to running the football. I think you measure any football team by how well they run the football, how well they stop the run, and how well they cover kicks, which speaks to the physical aspect of the game.
You look at our last game, you look at the rushing numbers, I think that bears out the result. It's going to be hard for us to win like that, right. So what we need to do, our identity is always going to be based on being physical and being able to run the football.
That doesn't mean that you're not going to do other things, right. Because you have to score points, and all of that -that's the special sauce, right. So, that's what you're trying to build every year and find the right ingredients to get to those things.
But, at the end of the day, if you're scoring points, and you have the ability to run the football when it matters, you're going to have a chance to win football games.
So when I look at big picture, macro, global thoughts, that's what we're looking at identity-wise.
