On bye week prep
“I spent a lot of time recruiting. I saw some good high school games. The message I said to our players is how does Alabama go from losing the first game to then they beat Georgia and how does Florida State go from beating Alabama then losing to Virginia and how does Illinois go from giving up 63 points, being 63-10 to then turning around and beating USC. I think a) there’s way more parity in college football than ever before and b) it comes down to your mindset, are you locked in and focused, whereas outside the building you might hear this teams this and this teams that. You really never know which version of that team is going to show up. You can only control yourself and so making sure our guys have the best version of ourselves showing up. I believe last year Michigan State coming off the bye, they came out and beat Iowa in Iowa City which is a hard thing to do, that’s a good football team. Jonathan Smith is an excellent coach. They'll have their team ready, we'll have to have our team ready. I think that's the biggest thing, and you saw a lot more close games, games going down to the wire, coming down to one play. In a game, where our game came down to one play, our guys have to make sure they’re ready to play so every player can chase their one play and aggregate 20,30 better plays.”

On a resolution to Nebraska’s offense
“I think we have a really good plan. We came out of the bye week feeling really good about a lot of guys. In terms of where they’re at, I think the team got a lot better last week. I think we have some clarity and we’ll have some things still to go on this week. Some guys battle things out as we go into Tuesday and Wednesday, but I think we feel good where we are.”

On young players preparing during the bye
“We wanted to get back to just playing football. That's the thing most people do during the bye weeks, maybe the second bye week you rest up a little bit. We understand we are one of the top teams in the country throwing the football, we are one of the top teams at pass defense.  We are not there running the football, we are not there stopping the run and obviously we talked about sitting protecting the pocket. There’s areas we need to get significantly better at and I don't know how to get better at running the ball and stopping the run other than practice. We have a lot of D-linemen getting a lot better. Like I said it's just the football part of it, a lot of the runs aren't necessarily on the D-line they're on everybody. It takes all 11 guys to run the football and  stop the run. That being said, I think everyone got better during the bye week and also had a chance to catch their breath over the weekend and they came back ready to work last night, we’re off today and we’ll get after it tomorrow.”

On Malcolm Hartzog this week
“He’s doubtful for this week. He’s trying to come back, but I can't say he’ll be back this week. I can't rule him out, but I can't say he'll be back.”

On frustration after a loss to fuel for this week
“No one cares about your feelings. I was frustrated, they were frustrated, play better. That's the message, play better, practice better, no one's coming to rescue you. There’s a lot of really good teams out there that are frustrated after a loss. I watched a lot of really good football teams on Saturday. Teams that were behind, came back and won, teams that were ahead, lost. Teams lost on two-point conversions, teams lost on a field goal. It's just the new age of football, there's a lot more parity. You lose the game, correct it, move on. We've tried to correct it, we've tried to move on. I think good teams never let a game beat them twice. That can sometimes be hard to do, but there's no time to wallow in self-pity.”

On Michigan State’s punter
“He’s an NFL punter, it’s impressive what he can do. We also have a really good punt return team. They have an excellent punt team, we have an excellent punt return team. We’ll have to make good decisions back there, backed up, but at the same time, we want Jacory (Barney Jr.) to catch the ball and go try and make something happen. We are here to play football. We are going to try to win the game, we're going to try and play football. We’re not going to just fair catch everything, we’re going to try and make some plays. I trust Jacory, but it's really not Jacory it's the ten guys in front of him that give him a chance, but the punter is excellent and the punt return team. They are number one in the country in punt returns, they’ve got excellent special teams, but we like our special teams too and it should be a great battle.”