After Saturday’s tough 28-14 loss on the road to Louisville, Jeff Hafley held his post-game press conference. Video is below, followed by transcript of selected questions and answers:
On not getting points off turnovers and not capitalizing...
Proud of the defense. When you steal possession, it’s not just about stealing possession, you’ve got to score points. And it wasn’t just off of takeaways, we were just pretty inefficient for most of the night driving the ball. When you take the ball away like the defense did, you’ve got to put it in the end zone and we failed to do that.
4-of-14 on third down - what did you try to do to account for Louisville’s pressure?
They brought pressure most of the game, looks like they had most of the team up at the line of scrimmage - one of the more aggressive defensive schemes I’ve seen... sometimes it looked like the safeties were all at linebacker depth. They were gonna force us to throw the ball over their head. That’s pretty much what I saw... obviously we have to be better than that on third down, but for most of the game, they were pretty aggressive. They did a nice job, Louisville.
On trying to slow down Malik Cunningham...
I felt we did a really good job in the second half. They had done some different things with the bye week, they came out and had a little bit of a different run plan. We figured it out pretty quickly, it took a while for our guys to settle in and execute it. But up until that last drive [in the second half], I don't know how much success he really had - I thought we adjusted well. It’s 21-7 going into the half and it pretty much remained that way for the rest of the game until we scored. He’s a good player - he’s what I thought he was.
On defending Louisville’s running backs...
There were a lot of series early in the game where the d-line, they were on the field for a long time, in that first half when we were missing all those tackles... I thought we were a little bit gassed, with possessions over and over again. That was the first time this year that a normal running game affected us. But overall I thought the defense fought. You hold an offense to 21 points that’s that explosive - those guys fought, they did.
On teams coming after BC’s passing game and how to address it...
We clearly need to do a better job. Definitely the plan was to pressure [Grosel], so we’ll work on that, and we’ll get better.
Two back to back games where the QB struggled - is there a plan to look to the bench?
We’ll have to talk about it tomorrow, watch the film again. Dennis is under pressure, the offense is not executing, are we giving him a chance to actually make plays... we have to watch the film and figure that out. Honestly, I’d be lying or making something up if I told you right now that I have an answer, and I don’t want to say something out of frustration, because we’re all frustrated. But I’m not going to put that on Dennis. Let’s watch the film and have a conversation on that afterward.