BUTCH DAVIS PRESS CONFERENCE QUOTES
North Carolina is bowl eligible, which a few weeks ago didn’t seem like it was going to happen. The Tar Heels are playing their best ball of the season and look to finish strong as they travel to Boston College this week and N.C. State next week.
Obviously, weekends and Monday are a lot better when you win football games. It does not take long for the reality of the next challenge to pop up. We talked as a team about what a huge challenge the second half of the season is going to be. Boston College has been very impressive. To accomplish what they have accomplished, with a head coaching change and offensive coordinator change, they have just had an outstanding season. Frank is a very good football coach, who has a long history at Boston College going back to 1997. As a defensive coach and coordinator, you can see his thumbprint all over that program.
They are very, very physical on the offensive line. Maybe one of the best offensive lines that we are going to play against all season. His thumbprint with the defense, they are really a pressure oriented defense. They play a lot of fire zones and zone dogs, move the front a lot. They play great run defense, right now they are second in run defense and total yards in the league. Another thing that goes with teams who play good run defense is a team that can run the football. That is another thing they do extremely well. They have an older experienced young man playing quarterback. I had a similar situation with a wide receiver I had at Miami, by the name of Andre King, who played four years with the Atlanta Braves organization. It is kind of unique situation, but those guys really become a mentor to young players and really show a lot of maturity. It’s a unique play to play at Chestnut Hill. It’s loud and they have played really well up there this year. We jumped on the film yesterday and when the players left they had an appreciation for the challenge against Boston College.
Has becoming bowl-eligible taken pressure off this team? I don’t know. The pressure to win, I think, is because kids love to play and they want to win. And I would be surprised if this football team doesn’t come back to work tomorrow prepared to get ready to play. As we’ve tried to build this program, it’s all based on looking at the other team and realizing what the challenges are and how difficult the challenges are each week and what’s the game plan and what’s going to give us the best chance to win. And I think that these kids are learning steps and they’re learning lessons every week that we play and I think that will certainly be one of them.
On Kendric Burney’s development: I think the more any kid plays and they get in that comfortable role of feeling confident in that they know their assignments, you can really see a lot of their personality. As a football player, he’s grown a great deal. The very first year it was a battle back-and-forth between the baseball career and the football career and where does he fit? He was so young and so inexperienced and basically had no fundamentals at what he was trying to do.
But you could tell that he was a very, very gifted athlete. The more effort and energy that he’s put into it and the focus of his work over the last two years, he reaps the benefits because he has real play-making instincts. He just has a really good gift of diagnosing routes and realizing where the threats are and making plays on the ball. He’s got outstanding hands and the plays that he made this weekend – it’s kind of like the Hakeem Nicks’ thing. You see it somewhat infrequently during the season, but we see it a lot in practice.