MEET THE PRESS: Fritz Previews Tulsa at Weekly News Conference

NEW ORLEANS – Listed below is the complete transcript from Green Wave head coach Willie Fritz weekly press conference leading up to Tulane’s matchup vs. UConn on Saturday.

Opening Statement:
“Just a recap of last week’s game against Navy – it was a tough ball game. We did not start off very well, we fell behind 24-0 and then 31-14 at the half-time. But I was really proud of our guys with having a better foot forward the second half. We just were not hitting on any cylinders in first quarter: offense, defense, or making anything happen in the kicking game. Our guys fought their tails off in the second half. We tied the game up and were hoping to go into overtime, I felt like we had momentum. That is one of the reasons I did not want to go for two in that point in time. Unfortunately, we just did not quite get it done. We need to win games like that, there is no question. We have to turn the page and move on to our game against Tulsa. Tulsa is a would’ve, should’ve, could’ve team with Memphis last week, they missed a 29-yard field goal at the buzzer to win and ended up getting beat 42-41. They had the same kind of situation where they could have won at the end of the game against SMU. Those are both two really good teams, two Top 20 teams in the country. We are going to have our hands full and need to play extremely well this weekend against Tulsa.”

On Tulsa’s running game…
“They have a bunch of good backs. What they do is they spread you out. You go out there to cover those guys and then all of a sudden if you do not fit it up right, you have problems. You have to pick your poison a little bit, with packing the box and playing the run or playing the pass. You know you are going to have to rally and be right or someone is going to have to whip a block to make a tackle because they have enough bodies to block you.”

On defense against Navy…
“You try to replicate what they do during the summer, but I am going to have to do a better job of finding a way to replicate their offense. The speed of the game is just so different and they were running a lot of trap early and a bit in the middle. Our backers fit it wrong on a few occasions. Our defensive linemen did not squeeze and rob shoulder, which we wanted them to do. Then we started to get the speed of the game under our belt and we started playing it better. Besides the last drive, and one other drive in the second half, really in the middle of the second quarter on, we started playing pretty good defense. You have to play good defense the whole game.”

On how coming back is difficult…
“I really felt like if we had gone into overtime I think we would have won the game. We were playing well on defense and also I thought offensively we were kind of having our way, but we stumped our toe that time when we had to kick a field goal instead of scoring a touchdown and also when we threw the pick early in the second half on the first drive. About midway or at the beginning of the second quarter besides the two interceptions, I thought we really played well offensively.”

On ability of Tulane to “play their way out” of the current situation…
“I think you just have to stick with it. We talked about our game plan and making sure we are on point with our openers on offense. It is also a game of what ifs. You have to practice some things and maybe they don’t show you.”

On Tulane’s issues in first quarter and whether this is a concerning trend…
“It does concern me. That is not good. I think we are prepared well, but we have to do a good job with our openers and do a good job with execution. You cannot rely on hanging on in the ball game and just figuring it out. If you do that against good teams, you will get behind by so much that you will not be able to catch up. We have to do a much better job in the first quarter. There are some games we played well in the first quarter and some games we have not.”

On playing up tempo this season and on defensive team “taking a dive” …
“It kind of seems like it is going across the nation now that people do that. I am not sure, there were situations in the second half where there was stoppage of play for long periods of time. If a guy is going down and thank goodness none of them were hurt seriously. They were all able to come back in and play. The thing I am concerned about, and hopefully it was just the 60-degree weather, they were tired and hot and humid and all those other kinds of things, but what if that would have led to a time out and now they do not have a time out in our last drive. There is nothing the officials can do about it, if a guy goes down, he goes down. You have to go ahead and stop the play. It is something that seems to be happening quite frequently and it is always on the defensive side and it is always against a fast tempo offense.”

On whether this puts a team at a competitive disadvantage…
“I think it does, if that is what they are doing, you would have to ask them if that is a tactic that you are not supposed to do or if its coincidental.”

On whether there is anything the rules committee can do to address it…
“I do not know. The only thing, I was on the rules committee years ago and the thing we talked about was that the guy was not able to play the rest of that half, he was injured and there was a reason we had to stop the game and get him of the field. Now he does not play the rest of that half. If that happens with too many guys, that is going to be difficult to do. Certainly, it has to be on the coaches, because the officials have to do that. I have thought about it the other way too, what if a guy who has sickle cell is out there playing and it is hot day. You actually have a game where it is 95-degrees and 90 percent humidity, you need to get that guy out of there somehow. Now you have to make that decision of will I call a timeout or what do we tell the kid to do? Get down or whatever? I have not had a chance to analyze it or look at it, I have moved on to the next game.”