Clawson Presser

Coach Clawson met the media yesterday.  He had the following things to say.

Sometimes Coach watches the films and a game looks better or worse than he thought.  Not much changed this time.  BG tackled as poorly as they have all year, missing more tackles than in the four previous games combined.  Part of that was the skilled WVU players, but also BG was sloppy and did not get off blocks and clog up running lanes.

He said WMU might be the MAC's most complete teams.  He says their offense is a well-oiled machine that he would enjoy watching if he didn't have to play them.  Carder is good, and they are deep at WR behind JOrdan White, who is an elite player head for the NFL.  

Their defense is improved and playing very aggressively.  And he said they have very strong special teams.  We'll look more closely at this later, but it appears to be a team without an apparent weakness.

There was more talk about tackling.  Normally, we expect to get  90% tackling rate, but against WVU it was 72%.  He said that tackling is a knack that is hard to coach.  In other words, you have to recruit tacklers.

He was asked about turnovers.  He said that each turnover has its own story.  Boo Boo's fumble was sacrificing ball security to make a play, which can never happen.  One of Schilz's INTs was on 4th down, which is a different story, but the other two were bad INTs in which he tried to force a play that wasn't there.  In general, he said Schilz is much improved and he has confidence in Gates with the ball.

He said the MAC is much improved from last year.

Finally, WMU's DC is a close friend of Coach Clawson's.  In fact, Coach calls him his closest friend in coaching.  His name is Dave Cohen, and he was Head Coach at Hofstra when they terminated their football program.  I recall wondering if he might end up at BG, but we were well stocked so he is at WMU.  

One last aside.  Coach talked about Cohen doing something that is important in coaching at this level.  He has his way of doing things, but he also is flexible based on the players he has.  This is my pet peeve among coaches.  When someone like RichRod comes in an declares a moratorium on competing while he completely retools the program, it makes me crazy.  If these guys were good coaches, they could work with the guys they have while they build their system.

As Coach Clawson said on his first day, "I'm not a system guy.  I'm in favor of getting the ball to my best playmakers in space."