Coach Walters’ Press Conference - Virginia Tech Week

With Fresno State officially behind us, a loss but still behind us, it’s time to fully turn our attention to the game against Virginia Tech. Purdue heads on the road to take on a team once considered an ACC power who is struggling to find their identity. They defeated Old Dominion last week to start 1-0 and now face a Purdue team who also is seeking an identity under first year head coach Ryan Walters. Yesterday was Coach Walters’ weekly press conference. Here are some highlights for me.

Virginia Tech has one of the most electric entrances in the country and that fact isn’t lost on Coach. He said, “obviously an electric atmosphere. We showed a clip of “Enter Sandman” in our team meeting last night, the Virginia Tech intro.” Here’s their entrance last week against ODU.

Walters provided an update on Purdue backup center Josh Kaltenberger saying, “If everything goes according to his rehab, if he stays on schedule, I would anticipate him being available, yes.” Let’s hope then that everything goes according to rehab because I’m not sure Purdue can handle going out there with their 5th string center again.

Coach Walters is aware of the third down issue.

You look at the game in its totality, and I think that kind of told the story. Obviously, time of possession was very heavily favored in Fresno State’s direction, and that was because they were 11 of, I believe, 17 offensively getting third downs, and we were 2 of 12.

We’ve got to come up with a better plan schematically, and then we’ve got to play with confidence and pay attention to details so that we can execute.

From a players’ standpoint, have to come up with a better short yardage plan. I think we had four opportunities to extend drives that were two yards or less and came away with no yards. Definitely have to be better on third downs on both sides of the ball.

He also continued to heap praise, rightfully so, on true freshman Dillon Thieneman stating, “Yeah, I was very, very pleased and excited for him, but I wasn’t surprised. We’ve seen that style of play and that consistency from him since the springtime. So, like I said before, the beautiful thing about football is that it doesn’t matter how old you are. It doesn’t care about what’s happened prior to the game. It’s all about the guys that are on the field, and he has deserved his spot on the roaster and his spot on the depth chart.”

On the receiving corps, it seems like there will be more rotations and more players getting in the ballgame against the Hokies, “I would anticipate the reps to be more evenly distributed, but — not evenly distributed, but more rotations for sure.”

So there you have it folks. Those are the things that stood out to me. Looking forward to diving further into Virginia Tech as the week goes on.