Pre-MiniSoda Presser

It’s never fun to speak to the media after a loss let along when you get a good old fashioned butt whooping put on you. Coach Parker got to do that today and I can’t imagine it was fun. To the transcript!

I normally like to include the entirety of the opening statement but it’s just too much. It’s incredibly long and I’m not sure anyone here reads it anyway so I’ll just leave a snippet.

I think the biggest key now for us is to move forward against Minnesota. Coach Claeys has got those guys playing well; they're 6 and 2. Another good football team, I think is giving up around 22 points a game on defense. They do a great job with their schemes there, and on offense they're averaging around 31 and a half, 32 points a game and doing some things well with their run game and playing very physical, playing the same culture of football they've played for years. So another huge test for us. Society is not going to take it easy on us to move forward, nor will they on me, and we're going to focus on moving forward and building off what we've done these first two weeks in a positive way, fix the things that we have problems with, continue to approach those and see what happens.

Will Purdue do something different to stop the run?

Yeah. I mean there's no line about it. We have struggled against it. And we have changed schemes. You've seen that change the last two weeks in those things. You always peer on how to change them enough, what is too much change, when is pressure too much pressure, when is it not. You're playing those games. At the end of the day we gotta get our guys playing confident, playing fast and competing every snap. I think that addresses more of the problems you have than anything. Some of the stuff we can't address. But the things we can are to continue to look at our schemes. We challenge our defensive staff and everybody's challenging themselves in the room to make sure we're doing what's sound, what's easy and what we can execute and what we can execute fast are the biggest keys for us, and that's what we'll always as a staff, you gotta look at, hey, what can we do best on offense and do it and execute it and do it well and do it better, and on defense we have to execute sound football, fit the things that they do best and stop what they do best.

How do you fix the turnover margin?

Sure. Absolutely. And it's hard to take that question in three weeks on the job. But you know what, everyone knows the turnover margin is the key, putting ourselves in position not only turning it over, but turning it over on the plus side of the field, which kills you. And obviously helping our defense focus on the handling the change of possession better than we have for the most part, which I thought they did a better job against Nebraska than we did this week, no doubt. But turnover margin is huge.

That turnover margin is not just our offense. It's our defense as well. We're not getting takeaways either. We're putting ourselves in position of having long fields on offense, short fields on defense, and that's never going to go well. And you add a little bit of what you alluded to and you add some depth to that issue and all those things and putting them out there too much and taking on eight possessions or more in the second half, that's hard to do for anybody, but especially when you have some depth issues and you're looking at why the issue is the issue.

What motivates you knowing you’re likely not getting the job permanently?

Just the players. And just being competitive. You know what I mean? And you want to do everything right by the staff and the players, so what they think of me and what everybody will speak of me long after I'm gone will still reflect the same thing I would have said prior to me getting this position. Does that make sense?

Everybody's trying to treat this into a platform and you should let cameras in and all those things. And I get it. I get what everybody makes choices -- I don't need -- I haven't promoted myself to this point, and it's gone okay for me. You know what I mean?

So I'll be just fine. I sleep pretty good. There's some things that wake me up in the middle of the night that I think of just for the players not for my life or my career or my family. Only thing that's woken me up at night has been what else can we do, what else can I do to find a way. You know what I mean? So we'll see. See what happens.

Given Yancey’s big plays is he getting targeted enough?

You know what, his targets weren't bad this past week, but it's been addressed. He needs to get the football more, he's gotta catch the football more for us. He's playing at a high level, and he's a good player, and we gotta get him the ball.

Can you update us on Richie Worship?

Not serious serious, but enough to where he will -- I think everybody could see he won't be available this week. But thank goodness for him. We're thinking about him and those things. Could have been real, real bad.

That’s basically all of note. I’ll be honest I’m running out of steam for these press conferences. Nothing really of note seems to be said and quite frankly football in general is just draining on all of us. Over the last 3 season Purdue is 0-13 in the month of November and watching them lose each weeks gets very tiresome.