MANHATTAN, Kan. – Kansas State offensive coordinator Courtney Messingham and defensive coordinator Scottie Hazelton met with members of the media on Thursday at the Vanier Family Football Complex prior to the Wildcats’ game this Saturday against Bowling Green. Quotes from both Messingham and Hazelton are below.

The Wildcats and Falcons kick off at 11 a.m., on Saturday inside Bill Snyder Family Stadium in a game that will be shown on FSN and aired on the K-State Sports Network. Tickets to the game can be purchased by visiting www.kstatesports.com/tickets, calling 1-800-221-CATS or visiting the main ticket office inside Bramlage Coliseum.

COURTNEY MESSINGHAM, OFFENSIVE COORDINATOR

On what pleased him the most during game one…

“Just the operation in general. I thought they did a good job, in general, of getting on the field. Skylar (Thompson) did a good job taking care of business and just, in general, operating as an   offensive unit.”

On what Skylar Thompson did well…

“Probably, the thing he did as good a job of any was keeping the guys tight-knit – keeping the huddle really where they were all on the same page and communicating. As many wideouts as we kept rotating in and skill guys in general, keeping them all on the same page.”

On throwing to tight ends…

“There is plenty in the game plan for them it just depends on how it unfolds. They played a whole bunch of man coverage and, like it or don’t like it, our tight ends aren’t always going to be able to create their own space when its man coverage.”

On performance of the running backs…

“(I was) really happy with them. I was really happy with all the backs that got opportunities to get in. They did a nice job of both carrying the football but also, on any of our protection stuff, we didn’t have any protection busts. We were really happy with the running backs as a whole.”

On playing 20 offensive players on the first drive…

“It is just a little bit of each guy has their own pieces of the puzzle that they bring to the table. We’re going to try to keep as many guys as engaged as we can each week. The more that we can keep guys knowing they got a part in it, ‘This is your part of it, so make sure you know it well, so when we as you to do it, you can take care of your business.”

On his philosophy of playing lots of players…

“It has kind of been the entire time I’ve been coaching. I feel like if you have one guy that is just head and shoulders above everybody else, then you’re going to play them more. But if people bring things to the table that can help us win, we’re going to use those things.”

On the Bowling Green defense…

“They do a really, really good job of putting pressure on you. That is one of the things we have to do a good job this week is we have to keep pressure off the quarterback. If we can do a nice job there protecting, I think we’ll have opportunities, but they’re going to try to bring more than just four to the quarterback.”

On wide receiver Joshua Youngblood…

“One thing is that he’s physical even though he’s a freshman. He’s got really, really good ball skills. He has the ability to catch the football and make plays. It just happened to be in this setting that that’s where he was at. Each week it could change a little bit. We want to get him the ball, want to get him an opportunity to make plays, but he also kind of got to get his feet wet. It was his first college game, and I was really happy with how he did play.”

On having special packages for quarterback John Holcombe II…

“We’ve got to keep getting him engaged and having him as part of what we’re going to do. He is 6-4 plus and he’s 245 pounds. The best part is if he’s in a ‘run quarterback,’ he can throw the football. He will be a guy that will be a threat. He won’t be a Wildcat quarterback where his only job is to run. He’ll be a guy that can run our entire offense. Obviously, Skylar (Thompson) runs our offense very well. So, we’re happy with that, but we need to be able to use John.”

On the depth of the offense…

“So far so good. I’m happy with pretty much all the position groups. The biggest thing is going to be, as the season keeps going, how healthy can we stay because I want to have the ability to use that many players each week.”

On drops by wide receivers against Nicholls…

“Obviously people saw some that are right out there, and drops in general are something that everybody is going to see or not see. The key for me is that we made a bunch of plays. Skylar (Thompson) didn’t blink about coming back to that same wide receiver for the next opportunity, and that’s what we’ll keep doing. Catching the football is a unique skill that not everybody can do, especially when there’s other guys out there trying to hit you. So, I was not at all displeased with the wide receiver group. I was really very happy with the wide receiver group.”

On fullback Jax Dineen…

“I thought he did a nice job. Obviously, all of those guys that were true freshmen playing, it’s so different now. Very, very few places is a high school setting that’s the same out there at (Bill) Snyder Family Stadium, (which) is a phenomenal game day atmosphere.”

On the overall play of the wide receivers…

“(I was) very happy. You don’t rush for that many yards without players making plays downfield as far as blocking DBs. I think, as far as their ability to create space and get open, I think they did a nice job. I think that that’s something they need to do because we’re not going to be able to run the ball for 300-plus yards each week. We need to be able to throw the football.”

On if it becomes easier to score touchdowns after getting the first one…

“Oh no. The biggest thing for us is worrying about the next drive each time. Honestly, the first drive and the second drive have nothing to do with what the third drive is. All of a sudden, you put yourself in a third-down situation and you need to move the chains. That’s probably the thing I was most pleased with was our ability to convert on third downs.”

On the atmosphere…

“It was a fun. This atmosphere is phenomenal. From our standpoint, I try to tell the players it’s just taking care of your own business and getting ready to play each play. I know that is kind of coach speak, but from a coaching standpoint, it’s the same as well. We have to follow the game plan and then execute it. But I had a good time. It was a great atmosphere.”

On being in the box vs. on the field…

“It’s actually been more about what position I’ve coached and the age of those guys. When I’ve been a quarterback coach and coordinator, if it was a younger quarterback, I would be on the field. If I had an older quarterback, then I was in the box. In this situation, with me coaching the tight ends and fullbacks and having an older quarterback in general, I feel great with Collin (Klein) and myself both upstairs. That’s how I would kind of like to do it if I can.”

On where he would like to see the most improvement against Bowling Green…

“I think the biggest thing I want to make sure we do between now and Saturday is keep detailing our work and making sure we understand that one game has absolutely nothing do with what the next game is. We’ve got to get better each day. To this point, I think that we’ve worked hard this week and hopefully we’ll be ready to play at 11 a.m. It’s more just continuous improvement, a want to get better, better at the steps I take, better at my aiming points, better at shooting my hands, better at creating space as a wide receiver or a tight end or a running back. I think our guys are starting to understand that every day you go out there you have to work hard and try to improve, because once that day’s gone, it doesn’t come back.”

On how the team has handled success…

“Really well. Really well. Now, we’re going to stay on them and we’re always going to stay on them. You don’t need to be patting yourself on the back when you play well. You need to really get into the details of, ‘What can I continue to get better at.’”

On if any new freshman will play this week…

“You never know with each week because of the four-game rule. We could have any guy that we felt like that really has done a nice job get an opportunity to get in and play.”

On how comfortable quarterback Skylar Thompson seemed on Saturday…

“I thought he went into the game very confident, and I thought after the first drive, he really felt good about himself. That’s something each week we’ve got to keep him understanding that, ‘You’re going to have adversity, so don’t get down if something doesn’t go right, especially if it doesn’t go right early,’ because he’s done a great job. We have to let him know, ‘You’re our guy.’”

 

SCOTTIE HAZELTON, DEFENSIVE COORDINATOR

On his overall takeaway from the defense against Nicholls…

“Week one, I think we learned some things about our guys. Hopefully we got some of the kinks out. There’s always a little bit of game-one stuff that you’d say. Some of it’s good, some of it’s bad. As always, there’s room to improve. Hopefully those guys took it in, and with this week of practice there’s a little more urgency in the things that they saw that they messed up. So that’s good. You can learn a bunch of stuff from the first game, just about people and kind of how we play. Now they kind of know the system and how we work things on the sideline. So hopefully they feel more comfortable in week two.”

On if there was a position group that stood out to him…

“I think everybody did. It was nice to see AJ (Parker) get a pick on second play of the game. That’s always a good way to start, and to score on defense is always a fun thing. I think when JA (Jonathan Alexander) does stuff like that it’s a good deal. So I think that those guys played pretty well. There’s bright spots everywhere. There’s some marks we have to get better everywhere as well.

On how Daniel Green played early in the game…

“He played okay. He had to knock a little of the rust off early. He missed a couple of tackles there, you can see him coming out of coverage. But I think he’ll get better as we keep going. The plan is to keep playing a lot of guys throughout the game, not just the two guys who are starting. So we see him as a starter also, and hopefully he improves this week too.

On his expectations of the linebackers…

“They have to be able to do a good job to communicate, talk to the safeties, get in the right alignment. Then, as we’re running just whatever plays, they get a chance to make sure they, hopefully, make those plays. We would like them to be very efficient tacklers. I think the two starters did a very good job of that. Like I said Daniel (Green) had a couple of plays that he should of made that he missed, but we’ll get those things cleaned up, hopefully soon.”

On possibly playing a 4-3 set instead of a 4-2-5…

“With all the spread stuff, there isn’t much of an opportunity to take a 4-3. We consider our nickelback, he’s really like our linebacker right now. So I don’t know when we would get into that, maybe a goal-line situation or someone came out more like we do where the true fullback and those kinds things we might get into. Really, we’re a 4-3 but most of the time it’s five DBs play.”

On how pleased he was with the third-down defense…

“There is some things we did well. It’s kind of like the whole game. There are things we did well – we got pressure on the quarterback but we didn’t get sacks; when they ran the ball, we played that pretty efficiently. But there are things that you say, ‘Well, that play wasn’t run exactly right.’ Those sort of things. We were good enough to make up for our mistakes in those situations and you hope that if you get off that field at that rate all year, that’d be crazy. You can’t expect that every week, but that’s what you like to be able to do, is feed the ball to the offense because they do a good job holding on to it.”

On the test of Bowling Green’s running style…

“It’s good because it’s a different game plan to go back and forth and adjust these guys a little bit. Hopefully they’ll continue to learn it’s week to week. We tweak little things in the game plan every week and we’ll see how it goes. They have two really good backs. I think our front four really has to do an excellent job stopping the run. It’s a different scheme, so as you look at it, ‘Hey, one week you’re going to play the spread where it’s all zone and moving around, then the next week they are going to come run at your head.’ It’s going to be good practice for us just to say, ‘Ok, we got to see how we run latterly and see how we stop the ball there. Now let’s see if we can do it when people just run the ball right at you.’”

On if Bowling Green’s offensive similarities to K-State helps prepare the defense…

“Through fall camp, I think the toughness factor helps us a bunch. I think their O-Line is good. You watch some Boston College tape too, those guys pound it all the time. So it’s a good challenge for us. At least the positive thing for us, looking at our offense, at least we’ve seen a little bit more big people in the game before where they condense sets or want to get into two tight end sets and those kinds of things. We’ve seen that, which is helpful for us. It’s not like we’re learning it from day one, where some teams, if all they see is 10 personal and spread all day, it’s hard to make that transition. “

On the atmosphere of last Saturday’s game…

“I thought it was great. The fans were great, they were loud when they needed to be. Coming out of the locker room, the guys were pretty jacked and that was good to see. It’s a really good atmosphere, it’s up there with a lot of them. The student section there waving at you, I had a chance to see a lot of that stuff, so it was pretty neat.”

On what impressed him most week one and what he thinks they need to work on…

“I was impressed by seeing the guys run to the ball, because sometimes that a thing that takes off right away just how hard guys play. You try to train them in practice, then you get into a game and you get guys watching a little bit on the field and going, ‘Oh yeah, I was supposed to run,” and you get some of that. We didn’t have a lot of that, so that was very impressive. And, like I was talking about, we made some mistakes there, there were mistakes with the scheme, but sometimes, just through pure effort, a typical fan won’t notice that, ‘We misitfit that but someone from the backside was running so fast he made up for that,’ and you say that’s a good play. So that was really good.

“On the other side of things, you would say we had a couple busts in there that’d you say, as It came through, there was a couple missed tackles that you’d like to clean up. I think those are things from week one that you always worry about. It’s the first time you really live tackle for a while. We missed some of those. Then there was a couple of busts in there that allowed some big plays to pop. so you obviously want to get rid of those things too.”

On how he would assess the defensive line’s performance in week one…

“The quarterback got hit. We always look at it like hurries, when you’re playing a good quarterback, ‘Ok, he’s going to get rid of the ball,’ which he did. He got hit a few times. The hurries will turn into sacks, the ones that you worry about is if you don’t get any hurries, he’s not feeling pressure. If he doesn’t feel pressure, then that’s a different situation. That’s a hard thing to play with. I think that he felt the pressure and got hit a few times. I hope we continue to get better there too.”

On how crucial it is to getting pressure against Bowling Green…

“Those our unknown questions. When they do throw the ball you’d like to get after it. They’re a little bit different, though, because they’re not spread; They will do max-pro stuff, so they have the ability to double three guys on the line and you get one one-on-one, so that one guy that’s got the one-on-one needs to do a good job getting there or we have to figure out a different way – adding pressure guys in man or blitz or whatever the case is. We have to let that guy feel pressure, and hopefully he will. It will a be a good test. It’s a different deal. You don’t know a lot about these people, like we didn’t know a lot about them last week. So you get a chance to get out there and say, ‘OK, we don’t know a bunch about these guys. We don’t know how good they are, how they compare, let’s see how it works out.’”

On Bowling Green’s biggest strength…

“Their run game, definitely. They have three different backs back in there that can run the ball. Their scheme is designed to run the ball. It sets up all their play action. When they do go max pro, their quarterback generally feels pretty easy because he’s back there and their max proing, taking shots at people. You have to live through the shots, but really the thing it goes back to, and what it always goes back to, is can you stop the run, can you knock it down, can you get him off schedule. Then you earn the rushes that way. If we get a bunch of those, then we get a chance to rush a whole bunch. If we don’t, then we won’t and it will be a harder game for us if they’re 3rd and 3.”

On the little amount of defensive plays against Nicholls…

“We’ve been in a couple of those, but those are few and far between. It’s great when you do that. We always say, ‘The best defense you can play is when you’re drinking Gatorade.’ You’re just hanging out. You can’t get scored on that way, you’re not giving up yards, so it’s great. If the offense can do that every week, we’d sure appreciate it.”

On the performance of Da’Quan Patton…

“He played really well. For me, it’s not so much about the stats or the tackling and those kinds of things. It’s about the fact that, here’s a young man is a senior, and that dude, if you just watch his play, he is running to the ball. That was the most special thing that I saw. He did make tackles and he played really well. I won’t take away anything from him there, but for me, it was more about, ‘Man, that guy’s giving great effort. He’s setting the bar for the rest of the defense. If you want to see a guy run to the ball, watch that guy.’ He was on it the whole day. That was exciting for me to see as a senior saying, ‘Listen, I’m going to take this to the next level.’ Guys were also running to the ball, but he was at a different speed. I hope that gets contagious and all the guys see that and start to try to mimic that.”