Here is the breakdown from everything Kotelnicki said when we talked to him from the explosive plays, to the music they hear in practice their opponents will play on road games to what he sees in the West Virginia defense.
What do you expect from West Virginia? For big 12 teams and things like that, I wonder how much changes by one game, right? You've seen them play pit now, and do you choose to deviate from what you learned over the summer about West Virginia?
Kotelnicki:
Well, it's a unique game plan because we got to remember for us, it was two games ago that we had just played them and it was three games ago for them, so there's some, "Okay. What'd you do? What'd they do? What'd they do in their bowl game? What'd they do in their first game? What did we do?" There's a little bit of evaluation of things that you confirmed and things that you maybe saw last year, game planning and things in yourself, scout that you go through in the summer.
It's a little unique, but it's nothing that you don't prepare for. You're right in the sense of what you do. I've mentioned in here before about everything, about how you have to evolve and you have to evolve as a team, and every game you play, you're evolving. You're learning about your players. You're learning about your opponent. You're learning about your current players' strengths and weaknesses and how they compare to your upcoming opponent. You're always going into a week of preparation, really thoroughly evaluating what you feel like you need to do to win the football game.
What'd you like most about your offense week one, and what do you want to see most in week two?
Kotelnicki:
I think when you look into, really college football in general, well football in general, when you play first game, there's always a first game mistakes that occur, and a lot of them come in the form of delay of games, and sloppy procedure penalties, and too many guys or not enough guys in the field. For us, in the first game to be pretty clean is a testament to our kids and the other position coaches and how they went about preparing themselves to do those sort of things, which is what the expectation should be, right? We should be able to expect to get that stuff done the right way.
There's always significant improvement typically from week one to week two, if you allow yourself to really focus on what you needed to improve on from week one. At least in my experience, three years of coaching, there's a lot of things that happen in the game where sometimes you go and say, "See, we talked about this and then it came up," or "Hey, you understand now what I mean, when we talk this way or why we have to get lined up like this?"
There wasn't a ton of that in our first game, so I'm happy and pleased with how that looked, but now we're going into a different environment. We're going the road, and so we have to make sure that's another challenge, another distraction that we have to be able to center our focus on what we do in our huddle and how we communicate and what we do.
What’s the difference between last season and now with West Virginia?
Kotelnicki:
I think so defensively, there are some newer faces that are on there, okay but when you watch them play, you know what I mean? There's still some Big 12 talent in that group. And then you look at, and I hope that they would say the same thing about a lot of our guys, is that when you look at the players that you played a year ago, those players that you're playing again, they'd look a year older, mean the things that come with being a year older, the physical maturation, the understanding of the game, the getting lined up, all that kind stuff. So yeah, it was three games ago, but how many months? 8, 9, 10, whatever that is. I can't do my math very well, but there's growth. I think I'm in both teams.
How did you feel about the OL performance in week one?
Kotelnicki:
Pretty good. I mean, I don't even know what the stats were honestly, but it was good. I think our yards pretty rush were pretty solid. Of course, you rip off a big one that's going to skew the numbers a little bit, but it was good. We had hats on hats and then give our running backs a chance to have some green grass and make some people miss, which that there was evidence of that occurring on last Friday night. So I'm pleased but, I'm sure coach has said, and I'll say a thousand times, there's another opponent right now that we're going to play. So I'm excited about the test that we're about to take.
You want to be balanced but how did you feel about the run game?
Kotelnicki:
Any game that you play, I think that's critically important, right? I shouldn't say that. I'm sure some people really, maybe philosophically are like, we're okay with trying to throw the ball a hundred percent of the time, but there's still a really physical element to football. And then we want to embrace that. We want to thrive in that environment. That's who we want to be. And so in order for anyone's success, I think you need to be able to establish a run game at least efficiently. And so for us last week, to be able to have some explosive plays and to do that, it's a good first step in our journey here this year.
In your offense, given where this program still is, are you approaching things of, "Hey, let's control the clock, let's shorten the game, let's ground and pound it out and play that to our advantage?" Or have you moved past that?
Kotelnicki:
Well, I don't know if I'd ever say that you moved past that because I think how an offense controls a game, time management is maybe one metric that somebody would use to do that, right? Staying on the field, keeping your defense off the field. At the end of the day, and I've talked about this before, our evolution needs to be on offense to make sure that we're finishing those drives however they look, right? And the most important metric in football that people measure is your points per possession.
And then when you're on the field, you need to finish with points. And that's one I do. If it takes 20 plays to go do that, fantastic. It takes one great, but we want to be able to end those things with touchdowns. And so every opponent that you play, there's a recipe to win the game, right? And sometimes that a recipe might be, yeah, let's try to control the ball, let's try to stay in the field and how does that look? Sometimes that might be, Hey, you'd be able to stay on the field for X number of plays, but you're going to have a big play potential to follow that up. So whatever that is for an opponent that you would face every week, it might be a little bit different, but generally speaking, you want to make sure that you're finishing the drives with points, you really do.
This might be an obvious question, but the idea of having so many backs when you're trying to control clock and do what you just talked about, how much does that help having that many guys who can plug in?
Kotelnicki:
Well, fantastic because in theory, everyone should be still pretty fresh. You could go on one of these long drives and we've been on 20 play drives before. You know what I mean? And how many of those end up being run? Let's say a dozen of them or whatever, if all of a sudden fresh legs come in every three carries, well, that's pretty, that's good. That can be tough on a defense. That can be real tough.
Ky Thomas was the bowl game MVP for Minnesota against West Virginia last year. Is that something where you picked his brain at all about what worked or is that just two different of the situations?
Kotelnicki:
Yeah, a little bit. I mean have those discussions a little bit, but I think you’re going back into learning a new offense and all these sort of things and so I think he's played enough football. He's smart enough to recognize maybe the differences and what that game was, or at least in the offense that he had been into now. But yeah, matter of fact, I just said, Hey, I was watching film again and every time I look, Hey, that's you. And so he chuckles and "yeah, I remember that play." And so talking about that, maybe a little bit to what the point was made before about, there are some new faces on that side of the ball defensively and they evolved too, right? Since then, since whenever that game was played.
How do you do scripting the plays?
Kotelnicki:
Well, you have a game plan, right? And you want to start games and you want to start with success. So, you want to be able to play to your strengths as an offense with the personnel you have. And all those things sound obvious and how that compares to the opponent you're facing and their strengths and weaknesses, the defense. You want to be able to have some success. Certainly, you're going into games with a plan to say, Hey, maybe we're going to line up a certain way and see how they adjust to this and how they would react and which I've used term the phrase before, complimentary football. How do those things go as the game evolves? So to start, right? It's about what do we do to be successful? What do you think is going to work? What have you been doing good? That's good. Let's start there. And then move forward into the game.
What do you see from West Virginia’s defense?
They're a very, very multiple group. Like their front seven. They do a lot of different things, in their back half, they do a lot of things and they connect the dots pretty well, right? So as an offense, you can put a lot of stress on yourself if you try to see too much, right? If you try to see everything, you're going to end up seeing nothing. And so it'll be important for our guys to make sure that they're, what I call game day eyes are focused on what needs to be focused on, whatever gap they're supposed to have or player or however they're supposed to run the route. They're concerned about their discipline, their eyes and we're not falling for the old sucker punch, right? Okay, because that's what can happen. So their multiplicity is definitely something that is unique to them.
What do you see from Jalon Daniels? He talks about getting prepared for the next game being ready.
Kotelnicki:
He does a fantastic job of that and that's one of my favorite things about him for a guy who really has only played what was a fifth college football game? You know what I mean? So, we’ve got to keep things in mind, forgot to play five college football games, to be able to come in and say, I'm going to start working ahead for the next opponent already shows a sign of his maturity, which when you guys talk to him, those kind of things. I mean he is that kind of guy and he wants to be a pro, right?
In every sense of the word. A pro is prepared, they move on, they don't sit and relish in how good of a game they just played. The pros go, "here's the things that we need to work on." And that was a message to the whole offense. So to your point about how does that influence the other players? If a guy can throw, how many incompletions did he have? Three? If he can throw three incompletions in a game and be critical of himself, then that allows the other players to be vulnerable enough to say, "Hey, you know what? I got to improve too."
And, so one of the things that we said is what we need to focus on is not our successes, but what do we need to work on to improve and get better? And I gave him an example, I said, as a coach, I mean hey, man, we rip off an 80-yard run. I said I love that, man. That's great football. I sit there, I keep watching it and rewinding it. And I'm like, oh, look at that, play, that's fun to watch, but hey, what about the one that got stuffed for zero yards? What happened here and how are we going to grow and evaluate that? So for him to do that, by example, for him to bring other players with, on the offense and watch film and do whatever, those are the kind of things that you want within your culture in terms of preparation, because you have to do more than just what we do in practice or what we just do in our meetings.
There were a couple mistakes and how do you go about talking about it?
Kotelnicki:
No doubt. Yeah. Well turnovers, right? You know what I mean? That was a critical one right out the gate. And we talk about wanting to avoid playing bad football and that's the worst kind of ball. So how they happen, why they happen, to address it, to point it out on film and to say, "hey, listen, this is one we talk about, maybe the depth of the route or the angle or where your eyes need to be, or your drop as a quarterback, or how we carried the ball or whatever it is”
I use the examples as a teacher, I say to the guys, I go, Hey, here we are, we talk about mastering the mundane as an offense, doing the mundane things well, which drill work can be very mundane to work on the fundamentals. When you go out there and we make a mistake, I present to the players, I said as a coach and a teacher, what does that tell me? That just tells me we need to keep doing it. We have to do it more. Right? We have to keep doing it. We don't have it figured out yet.
And so any of those little mistakes that you've talked about, even though, kind of what we're discussing here, you have success. It's easy to just forget about that and kind of just smile and pat each other in the back and go, okay, here we go. I think great programs who are very process oriented are always going to be critical of themselves and say, here's what we need to improve on.
What did you see from the tight end group?
Kotelnicki:
Well, they were pretty consistent. You know what I mean? Mason had two catches good first down on that two-minute drive and then the touchdown down in the red zone, at the end of the drive, which was great. I think they did a pretty good job of blocking the C and B gap. You know what I mean? It's been a multiple group and I envision that continuing that trend for all those guys.
It seemed like Jalon was getting the ball out of his hands is that by design?
Kotelnicki:
Well, the longer he holds the ball back there, the more likely is the protection's going to break down. So yeah, we do like to get the ball out of a rhythm of timing, as much as we can. We try to practice that way and maybe set up schemes and designs so that, because he's got one stimulus, one response, get the ball out if you have it. I think what I was most excited about for him in the game is that there are multiple times where he was able to work through progressions and there's a few explosive plays. That's kind of a big deal. And the fact that the protection held up well enough for that to occur was great sign and that he was able to go through it speaks to his ability to process and how he's maturing that way.
We have heard you guy play Country Roads at practice is that getting them ready for hearing it at West Virginia?
Kotelnicki:
Oh, absolutely. Shout out to Jimmy Lee our video coordinator. He's already worked ahead on every opponent fight song that we're going to play on the road and what they play in their stadiums, all queued up and ready to go for whatever we're doing that week. Preparing an environment that we think we're going to go into.
What do you expect from West Virginia? For big 12 teams and things like that, I wonder how much changes by one game, right? You've seen them play pit now, and do you choose to deviate from what you learned over the summer about West Virginia?
Kotelnicki:
Well, it's a unique game plan because we got to remember for us, it was two games ago that we had just played them and it was three games ago for them, so there's some, "Okay. What'd you do? What'd they do? What'd they do in their bowl game? What'd they do in their first game? What did we do?" There's a little bit of evaluation of things that you confirmed and things that you maybe saw last year, game planning and things in yourself, scout that you go through in the summer.
It's a little unique, but it's nothing that you don't prepare for. You're right in the sense of what you do. I've mentioned in here before about everything, about how you have to evolve and you have to evolve as a team, and every game you play, you're evolving. You're learning about your players. You're learning about your opponent. You're learning about your current players' strengths and weaknesses and how they compare to your upcoming opponent. You're always going into a week of preparation, really thoroughly evaluating what you feel like you need to do to win the football game.
What'd you like most about your offense week one, and what do you want to see most in week two?
Kotelnicki:
I think when you look into, really college football in general, well football in general, when you play first game, there's always a first game mistakes that occur, and a lot of them come in the form of delay of games, and sloppy procedure penalties, and too many guys or not enough guys in the field. For us, in the first game to be pretty clean is a testament to our kids and the other position coaches and how they went about preparing themselves to do those sort of things, which is what the expectation should be, right? We should be able to expect to get that stuff done the right way.
There's always significant improvement typically from week one to week two, if you allow yourself to really focus on what you needed to improve on from week one. At least in my experience, three years of coaching, there's a lot of things that happen in the game where sometimes you go and say, "See, we talked about this and then it came up," or "Hey, you understand now what I mean, when we talk this way or why we have to get lined up like this?"
There wasn't a ton of that in our first game, so I'm happy and pleased with how that looked, but now we're going into a different environment. We're going the road, and so we have to make sure that's another challenge, another distraction that we have to be able to center our focus on what we do in our huddle and how we communicate and what we do.
What’s the difference between last season and now with West Virginia?
Kotelnicki:
I think so defensively, there are some newer faces that are on there, okay but when you watch them play, you know what I mean? There's still some Big 12 talent in that group. And then you look at, and I hope that they would say the same thing about a lot of our guys, is that when you look at the players that you played a year ago, those players that you're playing again, they'd look a year older, mean the things that come with being a year older, the physical maturation, the understanding of the game, the getting lined up, all that kind stuff. So yeah, it was three games ago, but how many months? 8, 9, 10, whatever that is. I can't do my math very well, but there's growth. I think I'm in both teams.
How did you feel about the OL performance in week one?
Kotelnicki:
Pretty good. I mean, I don't even know what the stats were honestly, but it was good. I think our yards pretty rush were pretty solid. Of course, you rip off a big one that's going to skew the numbers a little bit, but it was good. We had hats on hats and then give our running backs a chance to have some green grass and make some people miss, which that there was evidence of that occurring on last Friday night. So I'm pleased but, I'm sure coach has said, and I'll say a thousand times, there's another opponent right now that we're going to play. So I'm excited about the test that we're about to take.
You want to be balanced but how did you feel about the run game?
Kotelnicki:
Any game that you play, I think that's critically important, right? I shouldn't say that. I'm sure some people really, maybe philosophically are like, we're okay with trying to throw the ball a hundred percent of the time, but there's still a really physical element to football. And then we want to embrace that. We want to thrive in that environment. That's who we want to be. And so in order for anyone's success, I think you need to be able to establish a run game at least efficiently. And so for us last week, to be able to have some explosive plays and to do that, it's a good first step in our journey here this year.
In your offense, given where this program still is, are you approaching things of, "Hey, let's control the clock, let's shorten the game, let's ground and pound it out and play that to our advantage?" Or have you moved past that?
Kotelnicki:
Well, I don't know if I'd ever say that you moved past that because I think how an offense controls a game, time management is maybe one metric that somebody would use to do that, right? Staying on the field, keeping your defense off the field. At the end of the day, and I've talked about this before, our evolution needs to be on offense to make sure that we're finishing those drives however they look, right? And the most important metric in football that people measure is your points per possession.
And then when you're on the field, you need to finish with points. And that's one I do. If it takes 20 plays to go do that, fantastic. It takes one great, but we want to be able to end those things with touchdowns. And so every opponent that you play, there's a recipe to win the game, right? And sometimes that a recipe might be, yeah, let's try to control the ball, let's try to stay in the field and how does that look? Sometimes that might be, Hey, you'd be able to stay on the field for X number of plays, but you're going to have a big play potential to follow that up. So whatever that is for an opponent that you would face every week, it might be a little bit different, but generally speaking, you want to make sure that you're finishing the drives with points, you really do.
This might be an obvious question, but the idea of having so many backs when you're trying to control clock and do what you just talked about, how much does that help having that many guys who can plug in?
Kotelnicki:
Well, fantastic because in theory, everyone should be still pretty fresh. You could go on one of these long drives and we've been on 20 play drives before. You know what I mean? And how many of those end up being run? Let's say a dozen of them or whatever, if all of a sudden fresh legs come in every three carries, well, that's pretty, that's good. That can be tough on a defense. That can be real tough.
Ky Thomas was the bowl game MVP for Minnesota against West Virginia last year. Is that something where you picked his brain at all about what worked or is that just two different of the situations?
Kotelnicki:
Yeah, a little bit. I mean have those discussions a little bit, but I think you’re going back into learning a new offense and all these sort of things and so I think he's played enough football. He's smart enough to recognize maybe the differences and what that game was, or at least in the offense that he had been into now. But yeah, matter of fact, I just said, Hey, I was watching film again and every time I look, Hey, that's you. And so he chuckles and "yeah, I remember that play." And so talking about that, maybe a little bit to what the point was made before about, there are some new faces on that side of the ball defensively and they evolved too, right? Since then, since whenever that game was played.
How do you do scripting the plays?
Kotelnicki:
Well, you have a game plan, right? And you want to start games and you want to start with success. So, you want to be able to play to your strengths as an offense with the personnel you have. And all those things sound obvious and how that compares to the opponent you're facing and their strengths and weaknesses, the defense. You want to be able to have some success. Certainly, you're going into games with a plan to say, Hey, maybe we're going to line up a certain way and see how they adjust to this and how they would react and which I've used term the phrase before, complimentary football. How do those things go as the game evolves? So to start, right? It's about what do we do to be successful? What do you think is going to work? What have you been doing good? That's good. Let's start there. And then move forward into the game.
What do you see from West Virginia’s defense?
They're a very, very multiple group. Like their front seven. They do a lot of different things, in their back half, they do a lot of things and they connect the dots pretty well, right? So as an offense, you can put a lot of stress on yourself if you try to see too much, right? If you try to see everything, you're going to end up seeing nothing. And so it'll be important for our guys to make sure that they're, what I call game day eyes are focused on what needs to be focused on, whatever gap they're supposed to have or player or however they're supposed to run the route. They're concerned about their discipline, their eyes and we're not falling for the old sucker punch, right? Okay, because that's what can happen. So their multiplicity is definitely something that is unique to them.
What do you see from Jalon Daniels? He talks about getting prepared for the next game being ready.
Kotelnicki:
He does a fantastic job of that and that's one of my favorite things about him for a guy who really has only played what was a fifth college football game? You know what I mean? So, we’ve got to keep things in mind, forgot to play five college football games, to be able to come in and say, I'm going to start working ahead for the next opponent already shows a sign of his maturity, which when you guys talk to him, those kind of things. I mean he is that kind of guy and he wants to be a pro, right?
In every sense of the word. A pro is prepared, they move on, they don't sit and relish in how good of a game they just played. The pros go, "here's the things that we need to work on." And that was a message to the whole offense. So to your point about how does that influence the other players? If a guy can throw, how many incompletions did he have? Three? If he can throw three incompletions in a game and be critical of himself, then that allows the other players to be vulnerable enough to say, "Hey, you know what? I got to improve too."
And, so one of the things that we said is what we need to focus on is not our successes, but what do we need to work on to improve and get better? And I gave him an example, I said, as a coach, I mean hey, man, we rip off an 80-yard run. I said I love that, man. That's great football. I sit there, I keep watching it and rewinding it. And I'm like, oh, look at that, play, that's fun to watch, but hey, what about the one that got stuffed for zero yards? What happened here and how are we going to grow and evaluate that? So for him to do that, by example, for him to bring other players with, on the offense and watch film and do whatever, those are the kind of things that you want within your culture in terms of preparation, because you have to do more than just what we do in practice or what we just do in our meetings.
There were a couple mistakes and how do you go about talking about it?
Kotelnicki:
No doubt. Yeah. Well turnovers, right? You know what I mean? That was a critical one right out the gate. And we talk about wanting to avoid playing bad football and that's the worst kind of ball. So how they happen, why they happen, to address it, to point it out on film and to say, "hey, listen, this is one we talk about, maybe the depth of the route or the angle or where your eyes need to be, or your drop as a quarterback, or how we carried the ball or whatever it is”
I use the examples as a teacher, I say to the guys, I go, Hey, here we are, we talk about mastering the mundane as an offense, doing the mundane things well, which drill work can be very mundane to work on the fundamentals. When you go out there and we make a mistake, I present to the players, I said as a coach and a teacher, what does that tell me? That just tells me we need to keep doing it. We have to do it more. Right? We have to keep doing it. We don't have it figured out yet.
And so any of those little mistakes that you've talked about, even though, kind of what we're discussing here, you have success. It's easy to just forget about that and kind of just smile and pat each other in the back and go, okay, here we go. I think great programs who are very process oriented are always going to be critical of themselves and say, here's what we need to improve on.
What did you see from the tight end group?
Kotelnicki:
Well, they were pretty consistent. You know what I mean? Mason had two catches good first down on that two-minute drive and then the touchdown down in the red zone, at the end of the drive, which was great. I think they did a pretty good job of blocking the C and B gap. You know what I mean? It's been a multiple group and I envision that continuing that trend for all those guys.
It seemed like Jalon was getting the ball out of his hands is that by design?
Kotelnicki:
Well, the longer he holds the ball back there, the more likely is the protection's going to break down. So yeah, we do like to get the ball out of a rhythm of timing, as much as we can. We try to practice that way and maybe set up schemes and designs so that, because he's got one stimulus, one response, get the ball out if you have it. I think what I was most excited about for him in the game is that there are multiple times where he was able to work through progressions and there's a few explosive plays. That's kind of a big deal. And the fact that the protection held up well enough for that to occur was great sign and that he was able to go through it speaks to his ability to process and how he's maturing that way.
We have heard you guy play Country Roads at practice is that getting them ready for hearing it at West Virginia?
Kotelnicki:
Oh, absolutely. Shout out to Jimmy Lee our video coordinator. He's already worked ahead on every opponent fight song that we're going to play on the road and what they play in their stadiums, all queued up and ready to go for whatever we're doing that week. Preparing an environment that we think we're going to go into.
