Alabama football press conference with Mike Shula

These comments came during Coach Mike Shula's Tuesday October 14th press conference ...

Coach Mike Shula – We’re back in the SEC with Ole Miss on the road. It’s another game in the SEC so it going to be another tough game. Ole Miss is 2-0 and leading the West. We’re looking forward to getting a win on the road. This team is going to be good with Eli Manning. We’ve got to do a good job in all three phases of the game. Offensively, moving the ball. Running it or throwing it and trying to keep their offense off the field. Defensively, we have to know exactly where we need to be at all times and do a good job covering and a good job against the run. And special team, if we can play like we played last week where we made plays that put points on the board for us. Those are the things we’ll have to do against a well coached Ole Miss team. As far as our situation with Brodie, it’s going to be day to day. Obviously, he got to rest last week and we’ll see how he feels today and see how much time he gets in practice. If he’s going to be in there we have a plan ready. If Brandon’s going to be in there we have one and they’re not as far apart as people might think they are. Our team feels good about what it accomplished over the weekend in the way we won the football game with all three phases contributing. I think that’s what we have to continue to build on. There’s a lot of positives with that, and we need to take that with a little momentum going into this game.

He gets better with experience. He’s accurate and has a strong arm with a lightning fast release. He doesn’t take a lot of hits because of that. He does a good job of getting rid of the ball versus pressure. The ball always seems like its accurate and on time. You look on tape and see receivers who haven’t yet turned back for the ball and its already in the air. He’s playing with a lot of confidence and you can’t say enough good things about him.

When you look back at last week’s preparation, did you sense the team had a greater sense of urgency to turn things around?

I would say Yes, but not take anything away from week’s prior to that. One thing we’ve done is practice well. Last week we turned it into a win and hopefully we can do the same thing this week. When we have opportunities on Saturday we need to take advantage of them.

Do you ever take a look at the standing and if so, what do you think about what happened in the West last week.

For me it’s funny because the longer I’m in this conference the more it feels like the NFL. The coaching is great in my opinion. The talent … there’s always been a lot of great players in the SEC. As soon as you think a team is going to get on a roll or another team isn’t playing well, then sure enough you’ll have team go out and win tough ballgames. That’s a credit to the players and coaches as to how they can bounce back. The one thing I’ve learned over my years in the NFL is that momentum is great, but you can’t just say “We’re on a roll” and think you can get by on last week’s performance.

They’ve got some backs that have quickness and speed. They do a nice job up front with their running scheme. At first, you think they’re just running the ball to set up things for Eli. But that’s not the case. They do a good job of moving it. They can win football games running the ball. Now, having Eli as quarterback makes it that much easier because defenses can’t put 8, 9,10 guys up close to the line of scrimmage. You’ve got to be very careful to do that because all of a sudden you’ve got a quarterback who is very dangerous with some receivers that can get open against one-on-one coverage. You don’t want to put your defensive backs in situations like that the whole game.

(hear the audio) He’s a good football player. I’m not sure what their stats are against the run this year, but I think they’re giving up 87 yards per game rushing which is pretty good. But they’ve got some other players on that defense that are pretty good. They’re sound defensively. Another thing they like to do is blitz. They have a real nice blitz package, and that helps not just against the pass, but it helps stop the run. They’re pretty versatile.

Did you find anything in your team’s running game that you can go to more consistently, maybe a bread and butter play?

The nice thing about last week was even though we didn’t run the ball well against Georgia and we were running last week against a team that knew we were going to run it, I think our offensive line got some confidence knowing that we could still be successful in that situation. Our running backs were tired early in the game. It seemed like they were more tired in the first half of the last game than they were in other games. I think that’s because of all the runs. I teased them a little bit saying “All you have done is talk about how you wanted to run the ball more and now you’re tired. I guess we’ll have to do a little extra conditioning this week.” (smiles)

Talk about how important it is in that type of game plan for Ray Hudson to get 15-18 carries per game.

(hear some audio) Ray is a very good compliment with Shaud. He’s averaging 5 yards or more a carry. He’s pretty explosive so he’s got a chance to get a 15 yard gain. So if you run it 50 times, it’s easier for the back to get in a rhythm. It’s hard to do that every week. And I think what he did last week went a little unnoticed because Shaud had 170 yards, but he had a nice game and he’s played well the last month.

Derrick Pope didn’t play last week, so hopefully he’s got a chance. LeRon McLain, he’s got a chance to come back and play. Kyle Tatum didn’t play, hopefully he’s got a chance to come back and play. Those are three I can think of.

If Brandon (Avalos) is your starter this week, will your game plan change at all being that he has a week of experience behind him?

Compared to last week? Yes. Again, I don’t see us running the ball 50 times this week. Our game plan last week was bigger than what he saw on the field. We got some things going early that we stuck with. We would keep it similar to last week, but the game would be called with more passes and more of the things that he does well.

Some coaches send in certain games of certain officials if they didn’t like something. Do you do that?

We do that every week. But we do that not necessarily because we’re upset about something. We do it because it helps us with the rules. We’ll get an explanation back that helps us know what to coach.

Yesterday, Ohio State suspended one of its linebackers for putting his hands on the throat of the Wisconsin quarterback. In the first quarter of the Southern Miss game, Ron Davis one of Southern Miss’ players raked his glove across Ray Hudson’s face and it looked borderline intentional. Is that something you would call attention to with the Southern Miss people, and did you?

No we haven’t. Football is a tough game and you try to intimidate and things like that. But if you’re trying to hurt someone, then that’s something that needs to be addressed. And that’s something each team needs to do themselves.

During the course of a game, do you try to “work the officials”, and have you gotten any advice on that from your dad? He was pretty good at it.

(laughs) I probably haven’t gotten any advice, but I’ve learned a lot from coaches over the years just watching all kinds of approaches. Mine has always been if I have a question about something, I’m going to find out the answer. I’ve always been a believer of “Treat people the way you want to be treated.” That’s my approach with the officials, regardless of the circumstances.

When you look back at the teams you’ve lost to this year they’re ranked 1, 4, 11 and 12. What do you think of that?

I think it’s exciting to play some of the best teams in the country. It a great challenge and that’s the attitude we want our players to have. Let’s go find out how good we are. And we have found out. We found out that we’re not the best, but we’ve played some games where if we’d done some things here and there we could have beaten some real good teams. With that being said, we’re not there because we haven’t made those plays. We’re looking for consistency against good football teams and that what this game is about this week.

Even if you had made a decision about the quarterback early in the week, would you consider keeping it under wraps for the sake of strategy or something like that?

Well, I think the biggest thing for me is that I hate to make a decision until I know 100 percent that this is going to be the guy. I don’t think we’re going to be able to make that decision early in the week.

You’ve had some praise for Ray and Shaud, but is there anything holding Ken Darby back in terms if injury?

He’s been nicked up a little bit. But he’s a guy that we feel real good about. Not just now, but in the future and hopefully he can get some more reps and get in there because he’s been very productive when he’s been in there.

When you are running against 8 and 9 man fronts, do you tell the running backs that there’s going to be a guy unaccounted for that they’re going to have to make miss or run over?

(hear some audio) We do, and then we try to be a little more specific than that and say “This is where the free guy is coming from. On this play he may be at the point of attack. On this play, he’s going to be away from the point of the attack. A great example of that is if you go back and look the touchdown run Shaud had last week. They had 11 guys within 5 yards of the line of scrimmage. When Shaud comes through the hole, he looked to the left when he came through the hole and he was stiff arming a guy before the guy got there … when you look to see him go to stiff arm, there’s nobody there yet because he knew exactly where that guy was coming from. I don’t know if he stiff armed him or just ran away from him. But those are things that make him special in my mind. You try to coach that, but he does a lot of things you can’t coach.

When you go back on the road, how important is it for the kicking game to carry over its performance from last week?

That would be great. Hopefully, we don’t have to punt that much, but if we do, we hope Bo (Freelend) can punt like he did last week. It’d be great to make some plays in the kicking game that can result in some points or put us in a good position. Our guys are feeling more comfortable with our scheme and what we’re doing.