In his weekly press conference with the media, Mark Helfrich attempted to further address the blatant issues at hand: defense and confidence.
This Saturday, Oregon will face a 3-1 Colorado team that will be looking to take advantage of recently exposed vulnerabilities.
Here is what Helfrich had to say at Tuesday’s presser:
Coach, has there been a difference in how you guys have approached the defense in the last couple of days?
Well, I don’t know if changing the way you do things. You can’t manufacture experience. If you do something great, put that in your hip pocket and learn from it. If it’s a real negative thing, you try to learn from it and throw it away. Some of those things are personnel things, some of those are schematic things. In some areas you might be adding, in some areas you might be reducing. The biggest thing is just going out there and playing fast with confidence and doing your job; try and block out everything else that goes through a young person’s mind.
Yesterday Scott Frost said he felt like he was doing Vernon Adams a disservice by having him out there when he wasn’t 100 percent. How do you adjust the offense then?
Each game plan is different. We’ve got some skilled guys at wide out. We’ve got skilled guys at running back and some skilled guys at tight end. It will just kind of depend on how it plays out game plan by game plan. But anytime — we talked about this on Sunday night — a medical situation when he’s up or down, it’s easy: we don’t make those calls. When it’s kind of a grey area — I’m not speaking specifically of Vernon, but in general — that’s where it’s most difficult. Again, a lot of these guys are competitive and want to be out there no matter what. You weigh that. We’re always going to put who we think will give us the best chance out there.
Are you expecting to see a more confident Colorado team now that they’ve had some results? I’m sure they think they can beat you guys after last week.
Definitely. They’re playing with a ton of confidence. The way things have set up for them: they’re absolutely riding high on offense, on defense, on special teams. (They) played really well last week, caused a ton of turnovers and you can see the confidence is building.
After the game, you had guys like Hardrick and Buckner both say that the younger guys needed to pull their weight a little bit more; that maybe when they put on their uniform after coming to such a winning program, they expect to win. It (obviously) takes more than that. You get any of that sense from the young guys?
We harp on that all the time. That could be a fifth-year senior, that could be a true freshman, that could be a coach, that could be anybody. I always say: we don’t get points because the “O” shows up. We have to earn every single inch, every single day. That absolutely can’t happen: guys show up and expect to get whatever.
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Take a knee: Mark Helfrich and Oregon prepare for a “confident” Colorado team
Hayden Kim
September 28, 2015
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