Question: How would you describe the BYU offense?
Rocky Long: “It’s the most unique, wide open, changing offense that I’ve watched on film in all my years of coaching. One minute they’ll have three tight ends and a running back in the game, the next minute they’ll have five wide receivers, the next minute they’ll have four wide receivers and the quarterback at the widest receiver with (running back) Luke Staley at quarterback in the shotgun, the next minute they’ll have two tight ends and two running backs in the backfield, next minute they’ll have three wide receivers and two backs in the backfield. They’ll run a four tight end formation with two of the tight ends in the backfield. They give you every formation that’s ever been shown on a football field and they use every personnel group that can be used. You have to have five offensive linemen, that’s the rule, but other than that they very seldom put standard personnel or a standard formation out there.”
Question: Is it the best offense you’ve ever seen?
Rocky Long: “No, the best offense I ever saw was Tennessee with Peyton Manning. Now Peyton was a great quarterback, they had big time receivers and three or four different running backs that are in the pro’s. It wasn’t the best because of the scheme, but because of the talent level of Tennessee.”
Question: Is (BYU quarterback) Brandon Doman in the same class of some of BYU’s previous great quarterbacks? Rocky Long: “He reminds me more of Steve Young. He’s not left handed obviously, but he’s really fast, he’s an old high school wishbone quarterback and they do run the option. That’s an added thing that (BYU head coach) Gary Crowton didn’t run at Louisiana Tech because he had a quarterback that could throw it, but couldn’t run outside. Doman can run it, so they’ve run several different kinds of option plays which keeps you from blitzing too much. It won’t keep us from blitzing, but the option slows that down a little bit. He throws it good, he completes almost 69 percent of his passes and he’s ranked third in the NCAA, I think, in passing efficiency. If you cover everybody, he takes off and runs with it. Now he has become a passing quarterback, last year he tried to run over you in the last two games of the year. This year he’s stepping out of bounds or does the hook slide once you corral him. So hes developed a throwing quarterback’s mentality, but he’s really fast. I remember Steve Young taking off on a scramble and we didn’t have a guy on the team who could catch him.”
Question: How do you slow them down?
Rocky Long: “I don’t think you do slow them down. You have to keep the ball away from them and you have to outscore them or they have to make a bunch of turnovers like they did against UNLV. The only reason the score was 35 against UNLV was because they fumbled twice inside the 20 and UNLV got it. UNLV runs the ball well and controlled the time of possession, so they didn’t have it nearly as much. I think they’re averaging 83 plays a game and against UNLV they only ran 65 plays. They haven’t turned the ball over like that against anybody else.”
Question: How would you describe BYU’s defense?
Rocky Long: “Their defense is very talented. They have probably a first round draft choice and a top three round draft choice at defensive end. They have a top three round draft choice at middle linebacker, they probably have two offensive linemen that will be drafted and the running back, if he doesn’t get hurt anymore, will be a first round draft choice when he decides to come out. They’re a very, very talented football team. On defense, their big and very physical up front and this is different than what they’ve done in the past, but they’re playing a lot of different coverages. In the past they’ve played a total of two coverages, they’ve played one zone and one man. Now they’re doing some zone blitzing which is a little different than what they’ve done before, but they’re almost exclusively a four-man rush team. They line up with four down guys, they rush four, they don’t blitz very much and all four of those guys are pretty dominant players. All three of their linebackers are good players. The middle linebacker is a top draft choice and the other two are pretty good players too, they all have a lot of experience. The inexperience they have on defense is in their secondary, two of those guys are new I think.”
Question: So how do you try to outscore them?
Rocky Long: “I think the longer you keep the ball, the lower the score will be and that gives you a better chance to win. If we say they’re going to throw it 60 times, so we’re going to throw it 60 times, they’re better at that than we are. We can be successful if we can keep it 10 more minutes than they do and cause more big plays on defense than we give up.”
Question: Did you play a lot of zone in the secondary against Wyoming?
Rocky Long: “Probably about 30 percent of the time. All but the last touchdown drive, every long pass they threw was a blown assignment and contrary to some of the things I’ve heard, they were not against zone coverage, they were against man-free coverage. Two different young men played cover three while everybody else was playing man-free and the guy running down the field was his man. Now the last touchdown we played a lot of zone coverage on the last drive.”
Question: How would you rate (UNM quarterback) Casey Kelly’s performance versus Wyoming?
Rocky Long: “He played better than any quarterback play we’ve had this year. He made three big time plays where he avoided the rush and completed the ball for first downs. Now he missed some throws that could’ve really helped us and he threw one really bad that gave them a big time chance, but overall he played a lot better than anybody has played this year at quarterback.”
Question: Is it safe to say he didn’t have a lot of trouble because Wyoming was so determined to stop the run?
Rocky Long: “They played a defense that was designed to stop the run and those guys were one on one out there and our receivers did a really nice job of catching the ball. They caught the ball much better than they had up to this point, but a lot more passes were on the money too, there were a lot more chances to catch the ball. It was fairly simple reads for Casey too. If theyre putting all those guys up there to stop the run, it’s one on one out there. So it was a fairly simple game plan and he executed it very well.”
Question: Will you add some things to the offense?
Rocky Long: “We add things depending on what the defense does. They’ll be some things we ran last week that we won’t run this week and theyll be other things that we’ll run this week because of their defense. We’re guessing that they are talented enough and confident enough that they’re not going to change their defense to stop us. So what they’ve been playing to this point is what their going to play against us because I’m sure they have a lot of confidence that they’re a lot better than we are.”
Question: What is Gary Crowton doing differently up there?
Rocky Long: “There’s no comparison between what he’s doing to what they’ve done the last few years. He’s done a good job of fitting what they’re doing to the personnel. I watched some Louisiana Tech film when he had Troy Edwards at wide receiver. Well they did different things when Troy Edwards was the wide receiver to try to take advantage of Troy Edwards’ talents. Now one of the most talented guys on their offense is Luke Staley, so he’s doing a few different things to take advantage of Staley’s athletic abilities. He understands the scheme’s extremely well. They baffle you with formations and alignments, so they kind of put a defense on its heels, then they have really good players that are executing very well. The combination of all that makes them really hard to stop on offense. He beat Florida, Auburn, Mississippi State when he was at Louisiana State with the same stuff and almost beat Nebraska. So he’s got a lot of talent there and he adjusts the scheme to fit the talent that he has.”
Question: Are the three and four man rushes we’ve some from you at times a reaction to the spread offense?
Rocky Long: It’s more of a reaction to the spread. A lot of it has to do with the protection schemes people are using now. Those spread teams come in as man protection teams, but ever since UTEP, who was a man protection team, got smoked, they don’t man protect us anymore. They zone protect, the keep extra guys in, they throw it before we get there. So the extra rushers aren’t getting there anyway, so you have to have some kind of diversified coverage scheme to try and slow them down. It goes in cycles, but right now until somebody comes up with a better way, the spread offenses are changing the scope of the college game. People are gaining a whole bunch of yards and scoring a whole bunch of points, but the run and shoot was like that for two or three years too and then sooner or later the defenses found a way to catch up to it. We’re in the process of doing that every week because we’ve seen so much of it.”
Question: In other words, are teams starting to figure out your defense a little bit, where you’re vulnerable?Rocky Long: “Yes and no. I think they’re figuring they have to change their offense against our defense because they change their protection schemes. They’ve decided that they have to throw it a lot quicker than normal because of our defense, so they’re adjusting to us as much as we’re adjusting to them. It’s why they pay so much money for great man cover guys in the NFL. If we got four guys that can cover man to man, they’ll have a hard time moving the ball, but those guys who can cover man to man are hard to find too.”
Question: What did you see in the UNLV-BYU game that you might be able to use?
Rocky Long: “I’ll tell you what the difference between that game and all the rest of them was, UNLV was able to tackle. You look at all BYU’s films, they don’t throw many deep balls and they run similar running plays to Wyoming, Baylor and Texas Tech. The difference in all the games is that everybody’s having a really hard time tackling them. Some of that is obviously athletic ability that BYU has, but some of it is that they give you so much stuff, I think it puts the kids a little on their heels because they’re so worried about getting adjusted to formations and what they’re assignment is, they’re not reacting quickly. UNLV played the same defense the whole game, they played one defense and one defense only. They were very vulnerable to certain plays, but they were a little sharper at running to the ball and they’ve got good athletic ability on defense. But the very best thing they did was tackle, they didn’t miss many tackles. I think that’s the whole key to spread offenses. If you tackle well, you play them pretty well, if you miss tackles, five-yard gains turn to 50 and 60-yard gains. They have a couple guys that are very hard to tackle. The two hardest guys to tackle are the running back and quarterback and they have one wide receiver who nobody can tackle.”
Question: Is it fair to say that this will be the best team you play all year?
Rocky Long: “It’s going to be the best offensive team we face all year long. Probably the most talented defensive unit we’ll play all year long. They’ve blown some coverage assignments too where they have people running wide open.”
Question: Sometimes when a team has an explosive offense the defense kind of relaxes, have you noticed that on tape?
Rocky Long: “No, I’m really impressed with how hard they play and it looks like they’re very intense. I think they’re fairly simple on defense. One of the problems with having a spread offense is that you don’t get to practice against the other stuff. So people that do other things besides the spread offense probably gives them some problems. It gives us problems when we practice against spread offenses in practice because the scout teams don’t give you near the speed, near the look that you’re going to get on Saturday. I think their defense fights that a little against teams that do play action and try to run the ball. I mean they’re big physical guys, but I don’t think they see the speed of the blocks and that kind of stuff in practice. It seems that they get a lot better in the second half though. If you look at all their games, teams are either close or ahead at halftime and then the defense really shuts them down in the second half. That lends to the theory that they get used to the speed, the way things are happening and they’re not seeing it in practice.”
Question: You said UNLV played the same defense the entire game, is that something we’ll see from UNM this Saturday?
Rocky Long: “No. They’re trying to baffle you with all those formations and we try to make them make mistakes because we give them a bunch of different looks too. If we can play man coverage and tackle them in the open field without giving up big games after they catch it, it’ll be a good game. If we have to start playing zone every snap, it’ll be a very poor game because they’ll have the ball the whole time and they’ll be scoring a bunch of points. I think it’ll all come down to how we tackle because they’ll catch a bunch of passes, but if we tackle them after they catch it, we’ll be just fine.”
Question: Are you surprised with how smooth the coaching transition has been at BYU?
Rocky Long: “No because those kids have been taught a similar philosophy. They were a throwing team when Crowton walked in there, all he’s done is given them a bunch of different formations to throw at people. I really believe it hampers defenses because you spend half your time in practice trying to learn how to line up to all that stuff, not to play against it, to line up against it. That’s the same theory we have on defense. We run about 100 different stunts, well if they don’t practice against every one of them, sooner or later we’re going to find the one that’s going to sack them. It happened last Saturday. They picked up every stunt, then we brought one we hadn’t used in three weeks and we got three sacks out of it.”
Sophomore QB Casey Kelly
(On putting the Wyoming game behind you and moving on to BYU)
“We’ve got to move on. Any week, win or lose you have to put that game behind you and move o to the next week. Now BYU is the most important game of the season.”
(On keeping up with BYU’s offense.)
“The whole offense needs to have a good game. We’re coming out and playing the best team we will face all year. We’re going to have to make plays, running and throwing.”
(On looking forward to playing in a game where the offense is going to have to score.)
“This is a huge game. We’re playing the 17th-ranked team in the nation.We’re going to go out there like we’ve got nothing to lose and give it our all.”
(On the importance of running the ball.)
“Yeah, we’re going to have to have success running the ball, as well as passing. It is going to take a complete offensive effort to get a win. When Jarrod is running the ball well we have a pretty good team.”
(On playing at home again.)
“I don’t know. It’s been so long I don’t know what it is going to be like. I still haven’t played in front of these fans here. Hopefully we can play a good game and give the fans something to cheer about.”
Senior LB Gary Davis
(On BYU’s offense)
“They’re good. They put up 50 points a game. I don’t think we’re going to stop them, but we’re going to have to slow them down to get a win. It’s going to be a big challenge for us but it’s something we’ve been waiting for. We’re going to have to bring our ‘A-game’.”
(What about BYU can you take advantage of?)
“I think we’re going to have to go after their quarterback. He doesn’t have a lot of experience starting so hopefully we can make him get into situations where he will throw passes when he shouldn’t and maybe get an interception.”
(On playing at home again.)
“It’s going to be very exciting. Its nice to be at home again and I’m looking forward to it. It’s going to be a good game.”