BATON ROUGE — On Monday, LSU head coach Nick Saban spoke to the media in his weekly press luncheon on Monday as the Tigers look forward to the home opener against The Citadel on Saturday at 7 p.m. Members of LSUsports.tv can watch the archived video now!
QUOTES FROM LSU COACH NICK SABAN’S WEEKLY PRESS LUNCHEON
Opening Statement
“I really don’t have a lot of new thoughts about the game. The tape showed pretty much the same thing that we talked about after the game. There are probably two words that describe it the most: effort and execution. I don’t think that we played with the intensity that we needed to play with to beat a good football team on the road and I don’t think that we executed as well as we needed to in order to have success against a good football team.
“Those things go back to preparation. It goes back to teaching and it goes back to coaching. All those things come back to me and us (coaching staff), relative to getting the team ready to play. I think that we put some of our younger players in some positions to make plays and the fact that it was their first time playing, they weren’t ready to do that. Now, we just need to work with them and make them better so that we can them be good football players for us here in the near future.
“The intangible things that I talked about after the game, are the things that are most concerning. I don’t know if it was the first-game jitters, or if maybe some of the older players were used to playing easy opponents in the past and weren’t devoted enough to being a dominating team. They weren’t used to getting off of the mat and being motivated by trying to prove yourself. It’s basically going to be different for them now.
“We need to use this experience to ‘get pissed off’ around here relative to who LSU is. I know the headline of the paper was “LS who?” and my question for our players is, “who is LSU?” We had made the mark in this program here by playing with a lot of intensity, a lot of enthusiasm, playing hard for 60 minutes, executing together as a team and playing together as a team.
“It really doesn’t matter much who we play now, because what I’m concerned with is how we’re going to react to whatever situation that we are in. The Citadel has a lot of football players back from last year’s team. All that’s counts is that they have a good coach and they have a good quarterback in Jeff Klein, who’s played here twice before in 1999 and 2001 for Auburn.
“They haven’t played a game yet, so especially with their offense we’re not sure exactly what they’re going to do, because last year they had a real talented option quarterback who did a good job for them. He’s no longer in school there for whatever reasons and Jeff Klein is not an option quarterback, so we’re not really certain if they are going to change their offense or do the same things.
“These kind of teams are very capable of winning games. The Citadel beat Arkansas in 1992, so our team needs to know that they need to prepare for this game and get ready for this game. Hopefully, we’ll be able to take care of business and be better. The people that will be out of practice today are: Ben Wilkerson with his ankle, it’s probably a lot more of his ankle than his knee, Eric Edwards who has been struggling with a foot injury is going to be day-to-day as well.”
On the impact that Ben Wilkerson’s injury had on the offense
“Well, I think that John Young did a good job. He went in and replaced him and Ben’s the leader on the offensive line, but I think as a coach you have to ask yourself if you want the injured player to play instead of the next guy. Usually, I’d leave it up to the player, but in this case, with the way that Ben was struggling we decided to go with John and he did a good job. He played well in Ben’s place.”
On if Virginia Tech did anything different on the defensive line that he didn’t expect
“No. They stunt a lot and they move a lot and I think that can be used against some of our players. You know, the way I look at it. We had 19 runs in the game and 11 of them were plus runs. We just didn’t run the ball enough. We got behind in the game early and that created some problems for us. They had some really good field position and we got behind. We would have liked to given the ball more to Domanick Davis and (LaBrandon) Toefield in the game, but even those players dropped some balls, fumbled some balls and did some things that we didn’t think that were going to do.”