On Hardy Nickerson's departure
Something that is really personal to me, I've known Hardy Nickerson since 1996, and our relationship is a lot more than just coaches working together on a daily basis. Whenever someone leaves the program it's tough. Hardy came in yesterday and resigned his position as defensive coordinator for our football team for persona reasons. Again, it's a tough day, tough time for our program. We're not satisfied with a lot of things that we're doing football-wise right now, of course defensively we haven't played great defense. Medical issues come up, of course they can make you do some things that you ordinarily wouldn't do. With that, when I look at whether it's an injury or in this case a resignation, there always has to be another plan when things go wrong or go a different direction. We have a plan in place for what we're going to do. I've been involved with the defense, and I'll call the plays defensively this week. We're going to move Rob Wright, a guy that's been in our program for three years, he's been an analyst with our linebackers, we'll move him to the linebacker role. Other guys on our staff will take on additional duties, and we'll move forward with Minnesota this week. As I said, there's disappointment with where we are, 3-5 record. But at the same time as you look at a season as a game, it's late in the third quarter, and we're behind, but most football games are won in the fourth quarter. That's when the real work starts. So we have a great opportunity when we look at this latter half of our regular season as we move forward. Injury wise we had a couple of injuries, offensively, defensively. I normally don't talk an awful lot about injuries like that, and we haven't actually practiced yet. As the week goes along, we'll try to let you know a little bit more than that.
On calling plays defensively with the resignation of Hardy Nickerson
I've been involved defensively, but I don't call special teams plays, offensive plays, or defensive plays. I've been involved every year defensively, but I haven't been in that role. I feel comfortable being in that role. One time last year, Coach Nickerson missed a week with a death in his family, and I moved into that role then, so we feel like we have a plan.
On the season up to this point and moving forward
The last three games in particular, we haven't taken any major steps, it's as simple as that. It hasn't been going the way we wanted it to, but there's more time, and we plan on doing something with that time. There's so much football left to go, and we've gone through, an awful lot, but eventually you get over the hump. We want to be one of those teams that went through some things, but came out of it even stronger and ended up finishing it up the right way.
On Mike Epstein injury
Mike is getting better, I don't know exactly how much better with Mike, but when you miss another game, you know something is going on. Something is going on with Mike, and we'll see how the week plays out.
On preparing for Minnesota
Offensively, a spread offense. Coach Fleck does a good job with this program, we've played them a couple of times, of course last year in Minnesota and had a heck of a game with them. Offensively spread attack, and they play hard on the defensive side of the football. They've had a couple of injuries, of course another quarterback played for them last game and played outstanding football when their starter was down. But again, good Big Ten team.
