Head Coach P.J. Fleck Postgame Quotes
Nebraska vs. Minnesota
Memorial Stadium (Lincoln, Neb.)
Saturday, Oct. 20, 2018
HC P.J. Fleck
Opening Statement
“Congratulations to Nebraska and Coach Frost on his first victory, it’s a big deal. Everybody remembers their first, and congratulations to him and his football team, they deserved it. They played really, really good football. They’re a very talented football team. I said it at the beginning of the week, this team should be 5-1 or 4-2, they’ve lost in some real strange oddity type situations. They’re very dangerous on offense, which everybody got a chance to see. We talked about #2 (Adrian Martinez), we talked about the two wide outs and the running back, and we didn’t stop them tonight at all. We didn’t come close to stopping them. We didn’t tackle well, we didn’t set an edge, we ran different things. We had to stay in base a lot more than we usually would, we were running out of secondary members. You start coming down to it, how many games left do you break another redshirt? If I put him in there, does it even make it worth it? Does he even know enough yet? But, that’s the position we’re in. Offensively, when you start down 28-0, we had a holding call on the first touchdown we had, I think it’s a completely different game if that’s not a holding penalty. You get down 28-0 and right now we’re not designed, with seven freshman starters on offense, we’re not designed to come back from that type of deficit without going outside of our comfort zone. We’ve had that happen the last few weeks where we get down early and it’s hard to be able to get back into the rhythm of how we want our game to go. Both teams, when you game plan, you want a game to go a certain way. When the game doesn’t go a certain way, and you want it to go a certain way because that’s your strength and you know your weaknesses. When Zack (Annexstad) goes down, Tanner (Morgan) comes in and he did a great job coming out of the half. I thought some of the really young receivers did a tremendous job. They’re learning valuable lessons right now as true freshman and redshirt freshman. Special teams got a big return, a lot of positive things coming out of that. I’m a positive person, I’m a positive guy so I’m going to keep looking at all of the positive things. I’m disappointed, darn right, very disappointed. Take the result away, I’m very disappointed about the week of practice we had to how we executed. There’s do and do not. You either do it or you don’t. There’s one case where we didn’t. That 100% falls on me, that’s my fault. Very disappointed in myself, I’ve got to be better.”
On cleaning up missed tackles
“That’s a great question. How do you clean that up? Keep tackling, but you’re in the middle of the season. You’re getting down to people who haven’t played a lot of football. You’ve got to get their eyes in the right spot. You can keep teaching, teaching, teaching and young people will put their hand on the stove, hand on the stove. Enough times and you’ll stop doing it. But, even when we set the edge we’re not making good enough tackles. We’re not big enough in certain areas, and they’re doing a great job scheming us and putting us into a position where those people have to make tackles. Where our freshmen or guys who haven’t played much, or our young guys, or guys who aren’t very strong yet get an opportunity to make tackles. We’ve got to fix a lot of those issues, and we will. I thought we did a lot of good too, there was a lot of really good stuff. Just catastrophic ones when you’re not exactly where you’re supposed to be when you’re supposed to be there. Again, they’re young people and that falls on me 100%.”
On Nebraska quarterback Adrian Martinez
“I saw from Martinez exactly what you saw from Martinez, I think he’s one of the better players in the country already. The reason why he’s ranked so high and the reason why he was a big time quarterback coming out and everybody wanted him and there’s a reason why he flipped here. He knew he could come in here and play and start and create his legacy and what he’s going to leave at Nebraska football. He’s a running back that’s an incredible quarterback. He’s so fast, he’s so quick, he’s bigger than you think and he can hurt you.”
On Frost’s schemes
“That’s why they have 550 yards of offense per game. They put a lot of strain on a lot of different areas. The one thing you have to do is tackle. If you can tackle, and you’re in tackling space, you can usually limit them. But, they get you in so many scenarios where you have to make a tackle, and that guy misses a tackle and then it’s a 50-yard play. That’s what they do really well. Schematically, we’re in the right positions. We just don’t make the play. You’ve got to be able to make the play.”