University of North Carolina Athletics
Butch Davis Press Conference Quotes
September 24, 2007 | Football
Sept. 24, 2007
Opening Comments
You know every week as we go along throughout the course of the season and sometimes it might become a little bit redundant to you all but every week is an opportunity for us it's a revelation about our football team. It's an opportunity for us to get better. This week is an enormous challenge and I know it sounds like you say that every week but for our football team at this stage of this program, every week is a challenge. It's a two-headed sword, one it's for us to get better at the areas where we need to dramatically get better and to improve and the other is the challenge of the opponent.
Without question this is going to be the best football team that we've seen thus far this season and probably one of the more talented teams in the entire country. It's a very, very experienced football team, when you look at their defense they have six seniors starting, they have three juniors, which means this is their fourth year of school and one sophomore. It is a veteran experienced defense that has been in this system, they understand the system, they know how the system works. Their offense with Brandon Ore as the running back, watching him the last couple of years when I was covering college football for the NFL Network you just a great sense for how powerful, strong a good runner that he is. They've made a slight change at quarterback from probably their existing plan at the start of the season when they thought they were going to go in one direction and now they are going with Tyrod Taylor which kind of brings back illusions to the idea of the Michael Vick, Marcus Vick. He is a tremendous athlete, they were really struggling offensively at the LSU game and they brought him in as a little bit of a spark. He moved the ball, not only throwing the ball, but he moved it with his legs.
Certainly Virginia Tech's reputation special teams wise, they are typically one of the best special teams teams in the country. They emphasize it a great deal, they put a lot of emphasis on it, they practice it and have a lot of talented fast athletes that certainly make their special teams dangerous. This is a test for our football team and again we'll probably say this for a long time a lot of this stuff still has to be about us. There are just things that we have to grow, that we have to learn and every game presents new challenges. There are going to be new teams and new schemes and new plays and it's an opportunity for us to find out more about what our kids can handle, what they can't handle and give them the opportunity to play the best football that they can possibly play.
I think that we had good meetings yesterday with the team as we looked at the film against South Florida. South Florida is a fast, fast athletic defensive football team. Very similar, but not quite as big as Virginia Tech, but there are a lot of different similarities. They put a lot of pressure on you and a lot of pressure on your offense. From last Saturday's game some of the things we had some opportunities that we wish we had over, we thought we could do well and we just didn't quite execute as well as we possibly could. I think that our guys saw that on film and that they learned from that and they are eager to get back to work.
On Ryan Houston:
I think for a young freshman coming in I think that he ran with confidence which didn't surprise me. I said it yesterday in the telephone interview that one of the things that he certainly did was he ran strong and he ran powerful and he ran with good vision. Hopefully that is the tip of the iceberg.
On T.J. Yates responding to the South Florida game:
I'm assuming that he'll respond positively. Every challenge that he has done poorly himself or whether the protection wasn't there, because he's gotten sacked before, he's been able to just wipe it off and put it behind him. It will be part of his growth.
