[Upchurch/Fuller]
Ryan Glasgow and James Ross
James, coach Harbaugh mentioned the second to last play when they shifted and you had to stick with the tight end. What were you looking at on that play and take us through that.
“There’s a lot of plays Minnesota did with the tight end whether he’s releasing late or things like that and I just wanted to keep my eyes on him, and it just so happened that he did try to release late.”
James, when did you start taking practice reps at the BUCK linebacker position and can you just talk about that transition this week?
“I started transitioning to BUCK as soon as Mario [Ojemudia] went down, that week after. Just consistently getting reps and trying to find ways to get on the field.”
This is the first time that you’ve played it in a game, right?
“No, I actually played it last week versus State- or the week prior to this week. But yeah, against State.”
Ryan, talk about the job you guys all did getting underneath the blockers on that last play. You seemed to get off the ball pretty well.
“Yeah. I mean, Willie [Henry] and Mo [Hurst] did a great job on that play, and the linebackers got a great push. We’ve never really practiced that live; it’s all stepping through. You don’t want to hurt anyone in practice, but I thought we did a good job executing on the field. That was probably our first live rep of that type of sneak play this season and I thought we did a good job of executing it.”
Did you know he was short?
“Uh, I had a feeling he was short. I mean, I was on the ground, not really looking at it, but I knew the guys around me were pushing back.”
[After THE JUMP: Erik Magnuson, Jehu Chesson, Jake Butt, and animal analogies for the offensive and defensive line]
Just to follow up, you’re so low on that play and kind of buried underneath everything. At what point do you know you got the job done?
“You don’t really know. I thought we had a good play design; Willie was spiking in, same with Mo, so once I got a good push and felt them get a good push you could kind of feel the momentum change from stalemate to us pushing them back, and that’s when I thought I knew that he was going to be short.”
James, you seemed pretty down on yourself a couple times when you bit on the read option. How hard is it to kind of be disciplined enough to make that quarterback doesn’t come out of there?
“The reason I was just so upset with myself is we go over it so much in practice. Just to not be focused enough on that play to make sure I take the quarterback or whatever I was supposed to, whatever my responsibility was, was upsetting but shouldn’t let that translate on the field. We’re in situations all the time where you might make a mistake, but just like this game happened we stuck it out and got a place to stand at the end of the games.”
James, you and Jourdan earlier in the season talked a lot about Jabrill. Seeing him on offense and you guys see him in practice every day. Just the level that he’s playing at as an all-around weapon.
“Yeah, Jabrill, he’s a great talent and brings a lot of energy to the team and he can pretty much do whatever he wants to do on the field athletic-wise and it’s a great asset to have on our team.”
What are some of the things that you’ve seen in practice that we haven’t seen yet, if you can talk about it?
“Heh, I don’t know. Maybe he’ll try to kick the ball.”
Ryan, you guys had a chance probably to watch the film now. A lot of big plays against. That’s something that this defense has not allowed this season. When you had an opportunity to look at it, was there anything you guys saw as a trend in that game?
“Not particularly. They did break a couple zone reads on us, which is pretty unlike us. That was…everything’s going to be worked on when we watch the film together today. But I don’t know what happens in the backend really. I just know what happens up front. I mean, that might be a better question for James but yeah, I’m not really sure what happens in the backend.”
James, what happens in the backend?
“I pretty much can’t speak on that either. They moved me to BUCK so I’m kind of close to him now.”
To be going into November with a clear chance to stay in the Big Ten race, pretty different from this time a year ago. What is it like and how energized is this team to go into November with the kind of shot that you have?
RG: “It’s really nice. It’s something you work for all year round. This is what this class and the class below us and above us has been working for for 4.5-5 years now and it means a lot. We’re really excited for the chance we have to possibly play in the Big Ten championship game, but right now we’re focused on Rutgers. They’re a good, improving team and we’re going to have to practice hard this week and get after them before we can think about anything else.”
JR: “Yeah, I’d probably have to agree with that. Last year, not being bowl eligible was a big thing for us. Just to get that out of the way- but like he said, we’re focusing on Rutgers and taking each game as the next. That’s our most important thing we’re worried about right now is that game.”
Did it surprise you how well Minnesota played given how they’ve been playing and the emotion they were playing with? Could you sense the emotion in that stadium?
JR: “It was a very emotional game for them and they played very well. We made quite a bit of mistakes and they capitalized on it right away and you could tell if we didn’t stop making those mistakes it was going to be a rough game for us.”
The last two games you’ve experienced the vastly different emotions of last-second loss and victory. Can you tell me first, anything negative carry over to the game with Minnesota after the Michigan State play and of the same token, do you think a positive generates from the last play against Minnesota?
RG: “About the play against Michigan State, we really didn’t dwell on that long at all. We addressed it as a team. Coach Harbaugh addressed it, and he basically told us to tell people live with it and move on. You can’t spend a week or two crying about it and let it affect your performance in the next game, the next practices so I think we’ve moved on pretty well from that.
“The play against Minnesota, I think we’re going to have the same approach. You can’t think that just because you do that once or you win a game on a great play, you can’t let it blind you for the next games and following practices.”
Last year Mitch Leidner played you pretty tough. This year obviously they were emotionally charged and he played you guys tough again. What did you notice about him the second time around playing against him?
RG: “I thought he was playing real inspired. He played a great game. We didn’t really capitalize on his mistakes like he capitalized on ours, and I think he did a really good job. I thought he was a good player. I mean, we knew he was a good player but I thought he played a really good game against us.”
How much focus or emphasis did you guys put on him knowing that he could move around a little bit?
RG: “We put a decent amount of emphasis on it. Not a ton. We just knew he was a good player: he can throw it, he can run it. He was a big-bodied guy who could get through contact.”
You guys are pretty good at saying there’s no payback or anything, but when you look at some of the teams you lost to last year, Rutgers being one of them, is there part of you that wants to get that one back?
JR: “Personally, I mean, this is a whole new team. We’re pretty much just worried about the next game and Rutgers is our next game. We’re not thinking about last year. We want to win every single game we play and that’s our mindset, so that’s our biggest thing.”
[Fuller/Barron]
Erik Magnuson, Jehu Chesson, and Jake Butt
Jehu, can you put into perspective what it was like for Wilton to come in the game off the bench, kind of have some struggles early on, and then go do what he did? How much confidence you guys already had in him and just how incredible that might have been.
“Yeah, so I’d just like to commend Wilton for doing that because that’s no easy position to kind of be put in, but at the same time that’s part of the reason you come to Michigan, to be a Michigan quarterback. He came out there, he was called upon, he did his job. He executed well, in my opinion, and so he was able to do what the coaches asked him to do in that specific moment and so we’re all really proud of him. We just knew we had to take care of him, make plays when we could make plays. These guys did a great job of protecting him, so we just got the job done.”
He threw you the game winning touchdown. Just what you saw and when you knew that was going to work.
JC: “So when we saw the safety kind of rotate and then we saw the corner playing soft he kind of- I felt like Wilton saw that all he had to do was put the ball back in an area and I just had to go up and make a play.”
Jake, Minnesota covered it well on what looked to be a wildcat throw to you. Obviously you’ve caught balls from Jabrill in practice before. Can you talk about his arm when he is called upon to throw it?
“Actually, I don’t think the play was supposed to go to me. I was supposed to be running off a bunch of the players, which…I mean, I attracted a couple of guys. They covered me pretty well. I think it was going to come back to Drake Johnson. He was supposed to get in the flat on that. We were going to dump it off to him, but I don’t know how that part of the play worked out.
“But yeah, Jabrill’s just a freak athlete. He can throw the ball, run, catch, all that.”
Erik, some struggles in the running game against Minnesota. What were the breakdowns there?
“Well, their defense, their whole thing is to stop the inside run game. They had eight guys in the box at all times. They’d bring a safety down, so the way you could beat them in the run game was running outside zone, outside run plays, which we had a pretty good game going that way. But their whole defense, they’re not going to let you run up the middle. That’s their whole thing. When you have eight guys in the box it’s kind of hard to do that.”
Could you sense the emotion in that stadium? And how hard they played, did it kind of surprise you? Did they kind of look like a different team from what you’d seen on film all year?
JB: “You could definitely feel the emotion and just with it being like a night game, both coming off a bye week, and their coach retiring and all that they were laying it all on the line. We were expecting them to play like that and it was an exciting game all the way throughout.”
Erik, do you feel like the running game for you guys is kind of like a tug of war? There have been positives. Drake had 55 yards and Derrick and De’Veon combined for 19. What’s been the issue with not being able to get that running game stable?
“I don’t know about past games but I know this last game for sure we knew we were going to have to throw the ball a lot. Their whole thing is to stop the run. In previous games it was up and down. I don’t know. I can’t put it on one person or anything like that. We’ve had injuries at running back.
“We’ve had injuries all along the line, but I don’t know. I think we’re doing a good job. We’ve got to keep getting better, but I can’t say that we’re not a good running team because if we decide to run we can run the ball.”
So it’s one of those things that comes and goes?
“Yeah. We didn’t try to run the ball a whole lot, either. If we decided we were going to run three times, run the ball first down, second down, third down, I’m sure we could have done that but that’s not what we decided to do.”
Erik, the coaches talked about how they might use De’Veon or Drake differently depending on how the game’s going or what they might need. As an offensive line, do you guys adjust anything for who’s at running back or how the game’s going?
“No. We don’t even know half the time. We’re just told to block. We’re trained pigs. We just do as we’re told.”
Erik and Jake, what was Wilton like in the huddle and did you notice a change as he got more comfortable? He even said on Saturday that the first series he felt out of sorts and by the last series he felt like a different quarterback.
JB: “It’s always tough. You’re not expecting to go in the game and then at a moment’s notice he just kind of got thrown in the fire a little bit, but I think he calmed down as he got a little bit more experience. Coach Harbaugh did his whole deal where he’s smacking him in the pads, hitting him in the helmet. It looks weird but I think that helped him out a lot.
“Wilt was my roommate this whole past summer and for him to get thrown in the game, he just was preparing like that’d happen throughout the whole summer and camp and that preparation really helped him and helped us when he did get thrown in the fire.”
Coach Harbaugh said after the game he noticed a couple weeks ago he wasn’t nervous anymore when Wilton would throw the ball in practice. Did you guys have a similar moment where you felt more comfortable with him or where you noticed that he might be ready to do something like he did on Saturday?
JB: “We all have confidence in all the guys back there. We’ve been throwing with them since summer. We had our player-led practices [and] it all really started then. We’ve been building confidence with everybody, and I think we just have that philosophy of next man up so when Wilton got his number called we all were confident in him. We all knew he could get it done.”
Erik, a couple of defensive guys were in here and said you can’t really practice the goal-line stand situation too much other than step-throughs because you’re worried about guys getting hurt, but as an offensive lineman you’re looking at that thing from the other side. Your thoughts on what the defense did in really stalemating their offensive line and making the play on that play.
“First of all, I feel bad for their offensive line because we have to play against that defensive line every day in practice and doing goal line against them is miserable. We’re pigs, but they’re like extreme wild boars.
“It’s a tough situation to be in especially trying to do a QB sneak because there’s so much beef up front with Ryan and Wormley and Willie Henry and all that so that’s a tough situation to be in for them. I don’t know what else they could have done because when you’re that close on the goal line everyone’s so close to each other [and] you don’t have room to get momentum or anything like that. You saw the picture. You’re nose to nose. I feel bad for them. That’s a tough situation to be in.”