Kirk Ferentz on the loss to Iowa State

Following the stunning loss to Iowa State, Kirk Ferentz met with the media to discuss the decisions he made in the second half, including going for two points early in the third quarter. He also talks about the play of his offense in the second half and if he still has faith in starting quarterback Cade McNamara.

KIRK FERENTZ: Obviously a tough loss for our football team. It kind of gets back to this rivalry; it’s basically what it’s advertised, tough, hard-fought games. They’re unpredictable, and certainly over the last X amount of years it’s been really close. They played a really good game. Credit to them. Compliments to them, the way they competed. They did a great job, and we came up short.

Most important thing, it’s going to hurt for a while and we’re going to have to move forward and see what we can do to build off of this, and I’ll get to that in a second.

Just a couple takeaways. The first half, our defense played really well and we scored 13 points. In the second quarter we kicked two field goals, one was off really good field position, the other was after a really nice drive, and had an opportunity at least on one of those to get a touchdown and to come up with two field goals there, it’s a couple missed opportunities, and came back and got us a little bit.

We threw a pick at the start of the second half, which was not a total calamity. We gave them the ball in the minus 25; they had 75 to go, but really what happened there, they had a couple possessions where they moved the ball and scored touchdowns, so their credit.

I was happy with the way the offense responded after their first touchdown. We came back and drove it and answered it with a touchdown. So that was certainly encouraging.

But came up short here at the end. They did a good job moving the ball, and credit to their field goal kicker. A 54-yard field goal is a pretty impressive effort on his part.

We played cleaner football, had the one turnover and three penalties. I thought our guys played hard and prepared hard. That’s kind of it in a nutshell.

The biggest thing right now for our football team, we still have 12 weeks in front of us, 10 games, and you never want to lose a game certainly, but the biggest thing is, like any time of the season, it’s how are you going to respond to it. It’s important for our guys to understand. I believe we have a good football team here, good leadership, good coaching staff, and when you lose, you have to move forward and respond. This one is going to hurt for a while, but we’ll move forward and learn from it tomorrow and go back to work on Monday.

Q. There’s different philosophies on going for two and when you go for it. Can you explain your decisions there?

KIRK FERENTZ: Yeah. I think maybe the debate would be is it too early, that type of thing. That put us at 19-7. I thought it gave us our best chance to win the football game, and to me the bigger issue is us not getting one touchdown out of those two field goal opportunities, and we had the ball down inside there close. That’s obviously an area we’re going to have to improve on.

Q. Correct me if I’m wrong; I think Cade went 4 of 20 for his last 20 passes. Did something go awry? Were they getting after him? What did you see there?

KIRK FERENTZ: Football is a game of momentum and swings, and they’ve played good defense ever since Coach Campbell and Coach Heacock got there. They made it tough on us. They made it tough, and we probably missed some plays, maybe some misreads or missed some plays where maybe we could have averted that. But that’s going to be part of football, and we’ll have to ride that a little bit.

But as I said last week, too, I’ve been saying for a while now, he’s working his way back. He’s still trying to get back in game shape, if you will, or game mode, and he’s working hard. He’ll do just fine.

Q. Postgame in the locker room, describe to us what you said to the team.

KIRK FERENTZ: There’s not a lot you can say. You can’t make anybody feel any better. When you work hard and everybody has got a lot invested in this game, it’s a big game for everybody in the state, certainly no bigger for anybody than the players on both sides and the the coaches.

After a loss like this, it’s tough. There’s not much you can say to make anybody feel any better, and that’s the first thing you say. It’s going to hurt for a while, but at some point we have to turn our attention to learning from it, and then the most important thing, again, is going to be flipping the page, and that’s sometime tomorrow night or Monday morning for sure and move on to the next opponent.

Q. You’ve had now one game with Cade that went well, another that hasn’t gone so well. Where do you see things standing at the quarterback position with him and Brendan moving forward?

KIRK FERENTZ: Probably the way I did coming into the stadium today. I think we expect him to be our quarterback. I expect some ups and downs. I’ve been saying it pretty consistently. He’s still working his way back into shape, as is our whole team with the offense and whatever. But we’ll get better. We’ll improve. Our guys have a great attitude, he’s got a great attitude, and we’ll work through this.

Q. Kaleb Johnson had a really good game, around 200 total yards. Despite losing this game, can you talk about what he did for your team today?

KIRK FERENTZ: Yeah, absolutely, and that’s part of football. He’s played well for us the last two years, but he’s playing at a much higher level right now. Part of it’s maturity. His focus is better. He’s practicing better. I think it’s experience and maturity. He’s been here a couple years. He’s run the football, worked hard to get better, and it’s showing out there on the field. He made some really nice plays today.

That’s one thing to be encouraged by. I think there’s a lot to be encouraged about, now we have to pull it all together and get it to mesh and gel.

Q. Do you make any major changes this week in practice, or is it business as usual?

KIRK FERENTZ: No, just do things a little bit better. It’s like anytime, whether we win or lose, the idea is to get a little bit better, take the experiences that we’ve gained, and we talked about this last week, game experience is different than practice, so this is another chapter here for us to learn from.

The biggest thing is what can you take away from that; what do you learn in the meetings tomorrow when we look at the tape, and then you make your improvement during the week of preparation and then hope it shows up when you compete the next opportunity.

Q. I wanted to ask you about your two red zone opportunities inside the 5 that ended up with field goals. Seemed like both drives up until the final play of the second one you had either 23 personnel or 14 personnel, just depending on how you classify one of the players. Was that the plan kind of all week, that when you got in that position you wanted to go with that kind of personnel grouping, and kind of what’s your ultimate thought about that going forward?

KIRK FERENTZ: In a general sense, yeah, that would be the answer. But then you always have plan B and C in case, and it depends how the game is going, what those situations look like. We’ll obviously be reevaluating that again after tomorrow when we look at the film and see what we need to do to be better, but it’s just an ongoing thing, but you want to have those things available certainly down in there where things are pretty tight. There are a couple plays there that obviously we could have executed better that pushed us back, set us back. That’s going to be part of the challenge as we go forward.

Q. Obviously every yard mattered at the end there. You took a delay of game instead of calling time-out before your last punt. Was that something you thought about? What was your thought process, I guess, in letting the clock expire and then of course they get the ball —

KIRK FERENTZ: Yeah, we weren’t going to go for it there. We were going to have to punt the football. Yardage really was —

Q. Why didn’t you call a time-out there?

KIRK FERENTZ: We could have. I didn’t think yardage was very significant at that point in the field, where we were at. We were at midfield. Six of one, half dozen of another. There was really no benefit, unless I’m missing something. I don’t know, maybe I’m missing your question.

Q. You were at the 41, maybe, something like that —

KIRK FERENTZ: Yeah, he could punt the ball out of the end zone. It didn’t matter. The yardage really wasn’t important. But to your point, we could have. We took a couple time-outs home with us.

Q. Every loss stings, but when you have a game like this where you’re up 13 at half, you mentioned the two red zone opportunities, final drive just needed a 1st down. Does something like this sting a little more because it felt like you let it slip away when it was there to be had?

KIRK FERENTZ: Yeah, both teams had opportunities. Credit to them for fighting back the way they did. But yeah, they all sting, first of all. I guess given a choice between losing a game like this or just getting blown out, I think I’d rather be in a competitive game. But it hurts regardless, and the biggest thing, just going to circle back to what are we going to learn from this, what are we going to take away from this this and how can we be better the next time we’re in a game like this because we’ll be in more of these. That’s just the way it goes.

Q. I can’t imagine there’s been too many halves that opposing teams have scored 20 on the defense. What did you see Iowa State do to kind of make that happen?

KIRK FERENTZ: I mean, basically those first two possessions, the first two touchdown drives. I think one was a big play, a single big play, and the other was two plays that really hurt us. We let the wingback tight end out. He made a big conversion, then we let 18 run down the seam, too. Those were two — that’s the part that’s just like not scoring when you’ve got the ball inside the 5, not scoring a touchdown.

Conversely on defense, we really try to defend against big plays, and that’s good evidence of why you want to make the other team work. That to me is the bigger story there, just the inability to defend those on those two possessions. The rest of the game we were doing pretty well, but it’s a 60-minute game, and this is part of the learning curve for us.

Q. Kirk, this team has been historically pretty great, especially when they’ve got an eight-point lead. I think the stats are something like 72-2. Did anything feel different about this game as that second half was going along? I guess what was different this time around?

KIRK FERENTZ: Well, no, not really. Like I said, they got their first touchdown and I was really happy with the way we responded. We took it 79 yards, I guess, for a touchdown drive. So that’s what you’re looking for. Things are going to happen. We’re playing good teams, so they’re going to have plays, too, and make plays, so is that response was really good. Then we weren’t good enough the rest of the way to respond or continue to respond the way you need to.

Even on our last possession, if you can get one more 1st down, now it’s never an issue of punting down there. Just little things like that that we’ll see all those tomorrow and talk about all those tomorrow.

Typically when you lose a game that’s where it goes. There’s certain things you can point to that are going to make a big difference. Sometimes those things get disguised or masked a little bit when you win games, but that’s really the difference in a game, making them chunk it instead of — going 10 plays instead of one or two plays, that type of thing.

Q. Both of these games, the game against Illinois State and this game, both have been a tale of two halves. Is there anything that you guys can do to put a whole game together, a consistent game together —

KIRK FERENTZ: Believe me, we’re trying to do that each and every game. That’s just how football goes sometimes. It’s hard to predict how it’s going to play out. Every game is a little bit different and every scenario can be different. The bottom line is you’re just trying to do your absolute best in all circumstances to — you’re going to have to weather tough times, and we’re going to have more of those coming during the season, and when you do get an opportunity to go and be opportunistic, having the ball down inside the 5, we need to come away with touchdowns because it’s like walking a guy in the ninth inning in baseball; usually that comes back and gets you. It’s amazing how that goes. Things like that early in the game especially can be consequential.