NC State wide receiver Keenan Jackson met with the media to discuss the Virginia loss, areas of improvement, and much more!
NOTE: Click the video above to watch the full press conference!
On the next steps after the Virginia loss...
There’s a lot of work to do. We're not where we want to be yet. So, as I said, we had a bye week last week to focus on our skills. We had a week off when we would have to do game prep, but obviously the coaches had to do it, and we were able to focus more on what we needed to fix.
So I'm glad we were able to do that.
You got a scout at Richmond?
Yeah, we're playing on Friday, so we definitely scouted them.
You have any thoughts on defense? What do you face?
Yeah, they’re a quarters team; they’re great out there. I'm really excited to go out there and play football, honestly.
What have you seen from CJ in this last week and a half of practice?
Leadership, no wavering from him. I mean, I trust him. I trust him overly. I have a whole bunch of trust in him.
So, yeah, I'm not worried about anything from him. He's my quarterback.
So he's really been setting the tone that there isn't enough fielding feedback to work with. I mean, we're getting a professional, so it's time to show up, get back to work, handle our business, simple as that.
As the team leader, how do you teach the team to respond when you don't get the result you wanted last week?
Right, so, yeah, I've been here for two seasons—so for a lot of the young guys, it's their first time they're experiencing a loss like that. A disappointing loss at the start of the season.
So, really, this message is that you gotta—I'm not the best coach at all, either.
Saturday, Sunday, Monday, I mean, I feel like I'm mad about it, right? But it's time—Tuesday—it's time to come back and practice. It's time to go to work.
You gotta leave it; you gotta flush it at some point, or else it's just gonna linger into your next game week, preferably until your next week of work.
So really, just flush it and focus on your next opportunity to go out there and fix it.
Coach Roper talked about resilience and the importance of being resilient after a loss like that. How do you balance building resilience and bouncing back while still taking a lesson from the week before?
How do you balance it? I mean, honestly, he set the tone earlier in our meeting right after the game. The same kind of message I just said: This game is for—it's not really about feelings. It's about just facts, what you put on film.
So really, as I said, Sunday, Monday, or whatever, how many days you have until your first practice, you're reflecting on that. We use the phrase, "put the game to bed."
Once you put the game to bed, you put the game to bed. You take your lessons from it, leave any emotions you have in the game where they are, and turn your focus to the next game.
