FOOTBALL
Coach Mark Richt and a delegation of football players met with the media during the Dawgs’ weekly press luncheon on Tuesday afternoon. They offered the following comments:
Coach Mark Richt
On Jarvis Jones being able to play against Kentucky…
“We’ll see. We’re not counting him out yet. He had been running on a treadmill underwater and did extremely well. We figured when we put him on land, he’d hit the ground running literally, but he wasn’t ready to practice.
If he’s healthy enough to play, we want him to play. There’s no thought of holding him out this game so that he’s 100 percent next game. I don’t know if anybody’s 100 percent this time of the year when you’re six games in. Just about everybody has something bothering them, but if he gets the okay to go, he’ll play this weekend.”
On the play of John Jenkins throughout this season and his career…
“Considering that he’s only been here less than two years and he was a junior college kid that came in for the purpose of trying to make us more stout up front in this 3-4 scheme, I think he’s done very well. He was very productive in the last ballgame, and he’s been difficult to move out of there. He’s put some pressure on the quarterback, and not so much with sacks, but with pushing lineman up in the face and he’s been stout against the run. I think he’s done very well, and he’s been a great team guy. He’s a pleasant guy that shows up every day with a good attitude, and he’s fun to coach.”
On the play of Garrison Smith…
“He’s done well for us. He’s been very productive and pretty stout against the run. He’s had some quarterback pressures, and we think he’s an SEC-caliber defensive lineman and we like what he’s doing for us. I think he’ll just keep getting more and more playing time as he goes.”
On Josh Harvey-Clemons being named a captain for this game…
He’s on three of our special teams, and every team that he was on, each coach felt like he played exceptionally well last ballgame, so he won the honor of being special teams captain for this game. It just doesn’t happen very often that a true freshman becomes a captain, whether it’s offense, defense, or special teams, but he’s got a lot of ability. He’s a great example of a very talented guy that just needs more reps on defense for the coaches to get comfortable playing him on defense on a consistent basis. But when he does, and you add another year’s worth of muscle and conditioning and knowledge, he’s going to be a heck of a football player. But if we threw him out there right now it would be tough on him, no matter how talented he is. That’s kind of what Kentucky’s been through a little bit. They’ve thrown some guys in there faster than they probably would like to do.”
On punt returns…
“Rhett McGowan and Malcolm Mitchell have been getting the work at punt returns, but Rhett is our number one guy right now.”
On the play of senior linebacker Michael Gilliard…
“Michael’s done very well for us. When Alec Ogletree wasn’t playing (earlier this season), Michael and Amarlo Herrera did a lot of the work, and Christian Robinson, too. You’ve got some guys that have gotten a lot of opportunity. When Ogletree came back, it did take away from some of Amarlo’s time and some of Michael’s time, but when Michael has been in there, he’s played very well. We have some good experience at linebacker right now.”
Linebacker Amarlo Herrera
On moving forward after the bye-week…
“We’re ready to move forward. The off week provided us with an opportunity to improve on a lot of things and a lot of people have been working to get better. We’re just ready to work hard.”
On having the full defense back…
“We should never have had excuses for anything, no matter who was in or who was out. We’re ready to get back to the top defensive form we were in last year.”
On the miscommunication that has occurred on defense this year…
“Sometimes it’s something as simple as mixing up who is supposed to be covering the running back and sometimes it’s more complicated than that because we have a lot of things going on. If one person doesn’t understand what they really have to do then it could mess up anything. I’ve had one of those mistakes against Tennessee allowing the running back to score out of the backfield.”
Linebacker Christian Robinson
On the miscommunication that has occurred on defense this year…
“I think a lot of the reason is that we might have a certain coverage in and we aren’t communicating with each other about who needs to be where. I think we have guys in the same position that aren’t executing until the whistle. This bye-week has been huge in allowing us to talk things out and fix these problems. A lot of the reason is that we’re putting new stuff in every week. Because we’ve been in this defense so long we’ve been able to mix things up and add in things but that can cause confusion sometimes.”
On moving forward after the bye-week…
“I think we should perform a lot better moving forward than we have up to this point. I think we could have been doing that a long time ago, but when we sat down as a defense Coach Grantham pointed out on film that if we just need to do our job. That’s where we’ve been messing up, guys have been trying to do too much or they haven’t been doing the right thing at the right time and that’s where we’ve lost games.”
On executing assignments on defense…
“I think we all know what we have to do and how to do it, I think the problem comes in actually going out there and doing it. That’s what we haven’t done and if we can fix that then we will win and we will win big.”
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