Narduzzi on effort, recall, Ollison and more

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Pat Narduzzi wanted more effort from his team on Tuesday, but he liked the knowledge the players showed.

NARDUZZI: Practice number two. Obviously, not much different from what we talked about yesterday. The big thing is, after 28 years of coaching and going on third season as a head coach, it’s the same thing. I can look back at probably what I said the second day last year, when I look at and really evaluate the four things we talk about all the time, the first one is attitude; we have a great attitude. The morale is great. That’s our job as coaches to keep that the same way.

I thought our effort was average yesterday. Why is that? It’s the same for the last 28 years - as a matter of fact, I’m going to bring another coaching point up here: Junko is on his 49th season, if you can believe that; he’s going on 50 next year, I hope I make it 50 - but in 28 years, the effort was just average, and why is that? It’s because they’ve been out there on their own doing it their way for the entire summer. No coaches are out there; they’re doing it on their own. So that’s something we’ve got to train out of them, the bad habits they’ve built through the summer.

The other thing, our knowledge, you know, the recall. Just watching our freshmen out there, for example; they’ve only been here for six weeks, really, five weeks, because they’re finishing up classes this week. So five weeks of summer school; I think they got here on the 26th, the 26th of June is when they got here and summer school started. They did an unbelievable job. I’m watching some guys going, wow, how do they know that already? So their knowledge is good…but the effort and attention to detail wasn’t there. So that’s kind of where we are.

And you talk about toughness - nobody can get tough in shorts.

YOUR EXPECTATIONS WILL ALWAYS BE THE SAME YEAR IN AND YEAR OUT, BUT WITH A YOUNG TEAM, DO YOU HAVE TO ADJUST HOW YOU COACH AND HOW YOU APPROACH IT?
NARDUZZI: Not at all. If I came out and said, ‘Guys, we’re younger so we’re not gonna - let’s win six games this year and let’s call it.’ If I told that to those guys, they’d walk out on me. Our expectations are the same: we expect to win them all. And we can. That’s not a - ‘Hey, we’re trying to tell them something that they want to hear.’ We can. We’ve got talent. Guys have got to make plays, we’ve got to stay healthy and we’ve got to do the little things right.

WHAT’S THE BIGGEST QUESTION YOU’RE ASKING ABOUT THESE GUYS AFTER ONE DAY?
NARDUZZI: You know, if I had one question, I’d have a lot of free time. I’ve got questions at every position. You worry about depth, you worry about injuries, you worry about everything. Are we doing too much or doing too little? All of those things are important. I’m worried about why a kid missed out of practice today; there are all of those issues. It’s like, how are we going to do it? Because they need to practice, too. School is important, too, but we have to have both. We have all kinds of questions; it’s not one. We have a hundred that I could give you. I won’t waste your time or bore you to death.

IN TERMS OF RECALL WITH LEARNING THE NEW OFFENSE, WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU GUYS ARE AT?
NARDUZZI: The recall’s there from the spring, so it’s not new to them anymore. And again, 15 days in the spring but it’s really 30 days in the spring and then the entire summer they’re going through it. They’ll have their sheets; they have these that we want you to do this. Whether they do it or not, who knows? They might say, ‘We ain’t doing this today.’ But they have their script that they’re going to run, so it’s not new to them. You can say it’s three or four months old or you can say it’s new since January or whenever Coach Watson got here. But the terminology for our kids is the same thing. It’s new for a Max Browne, it’s new for a Matt Flanagan; it’s not new for our kids because the terminology stayed the same.

If you went up to Coach Watson’s room, you’d see a board full of terminology. That stuff is - you know, there’s new ones you add every year offensively, defensively and special teams-wise, but that’s stayed the same.

YOU MENTIONED OLLISON YESTERDAY; IS HE GETTING BACK TO HIS ’15 SEASON?
NARDUZZI: Well, no, he better not be. If he’s back to his ’15 season, we’ve got problems. He better be better. He better be ready for ’17. ’16, he was okay; what’d he have? 1,300 yards or something like that?

’15 HE HAD A GOOD SEASON.
NARDUZZI: It was good, because he was the guy. We could put Chris back there and hope he gains 900. We want him to be better than ’15, but I think he’s there. I think he was better last year than he was a year before, but you didn’t get to see him because number 24-slash-30 was back there, and obviously you don’t get to see as much of the backup.

I think he has become more of leader, he’s more vocal and I think on September 2nd, we’ll see what he’s got. He had a good game last time in that second half, didn’t he?

TIPTON IS OBVIOUSLY OUT, BUT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT THE GUYS BEHIND HIM TO STEP UP?
NARDUZZI: Yeah, you know who’s there. The one guy that has really stepped up in one day - and when you listen to our strength coaches and the guys who are around in the summer, you know, Ox, he knows what’s going on - is Dontavius Butler. After one day - you heard about it, Dontavius Butler at receiver looks like he’s a guy that might be able to help us this year. And that doesn’t mean Darian Street can’t and it doesn’t mean - but he might be a little bit ahead right now. But he may hit the wall, as we’ve talked in the past.