WATCH: Doeren Recaps South Carolina, Previews Marshall

NC State head coach Dave Doeren met with the media today to recap the loss to South Carolina and preview Marshall. Here is the video and quotes from Doeren's press conference.

Opening Statement...

Just going back to the game for Saturday before I move on the Marshall with you guys, an update on Freddie Phillips. He did tear his Achilles and is out for the year. So tough break for a young man that's done a great job. The surgery was successful. I know Freddie will do everything just like he did this last year to get back. This will be a redshirt year for Freddie since he did not redshirt as a freshman or sophomore.

Coming out of the game, the things that stood out on the negative side, obviously the opening kickoff. We had two missed tackles and had a chance to contain the ball and turn it back to three guys and didn't.  Obviously the opposite of how you want to start a football game.

Two turnovers that we committed that they earned on their side of the ball.  Offensively led to 14 points for them, they got touchdowns off of both so our sudden change response needs to be better.  Then obviously the missed field goal, and that adds up to 24 points, however, you add it up.

You look at the rest of the game and stats don't make you a winner at all. You know just pointing out positive things that we did.

There are things that we got to do better ball security is probably the major concern. You know we went into the game for number one key to victory offensively was protect the football. Is the best thing South Carolina had done was take it away. Those two plays that they made were great takeaways that led to their two scoring drives.

Positives, Ryan Finley obviously had a very good game throwing a football. Kelvin Harmon had a 100-yard game, and Jay Sam tied Tory Holt's record with 15 catches in the game I thought Garrett Bradbury in his first game as a center really did some good things. He directed traffic and played hard took over 100 snaps and that's impressive alone. You know for an offense to have 103 gradable snaps and for several of those kids to play every snap says a lot about their conditioning.

I thought Johnathan Alston defensively in his first start as a defender did a lot of good things. He gave up a touchdown early and bounced back in the fourth quarter... had a big sack and a big interception. Defensively, holding them to 1.5 yards per carry was a positive.

Offensively we need to run the football more efficiently. We were only 2.5 yards a carry in that game.  They were packing the box, but that's still not up to our goal or our standard.

I thought AJ Cole, after the first punt, really punted the football well and flipped the field position for us twice which helped us in the fourth quarter. Our defense held them scoreless their last five drives and that was... at one point the game we were down 14 and our guys kept playing and scored and had a chance to tie the game at the end and obviously didn't.

We played two redshirt freshman on the o-line due to Will's suspension and that did hurt us at times. I think our run game and our pass-pro could have been better.

I thought Joe Sculthorpe in his first start really did some good things.

Really did have some key missed opportunities... a missed sack by Freddie on that blitz... that turned into a great play for them with the one-handed catch.  It was a play where you feel like it's a layup... you have an edge pressure in the boot leg and turns into a 50-yard scramble touchdown for them. Those are the biggest things that you look at. Just not beating ourselves you know at moments where we feel like we have a layup and that's something that as we move forward we've got to make our layups there.

Not to discredit South Carolina... they did a great job, and as I said before, I think Deebo Samuel is one of the best players will see all year.  I think the kid is terrific. Bentley has got better, and the defense will do a nice job keeping the ball in front of them.

With Marshall, I have a lot of respect for Doc Holliday, and he has a history here and was a great recruiter when he was here.  He has proven himself as a head coach at Marshall. I remember watching him defeat my former team, NIU, in a bowl game after I got here.  They really do a nice job. 

They have good skill. They are a young football team other than their quarterback. They've got a third-year starter at quarterback that has thrown a touchdown in 22 straight games, that's the nation's longest streak. He has 47 career touchdowns.  They have a tight end that's on a bunch of the watch lists. 

They have a great kickoff returner, and we need to do better on that unit. He returned two for touchdowns last week for them, which is impressive, Kion Davis one of their tailbacks.

They scored three times when they weren't on the field on the offense which is unique.

I have a lot of respect for a veteran staff that has been with good football teams and at big time schools.  They've got a lot of talented kids, they're just young in some spots. I know this will be a big game for them.

For us, it's a game where we need to finish some plays and get back to doing what we do well. Defensively, which is stopping the run and not giving up big plays and finishing some sacks. I thought we got better in the second half on third down. Defensively we gave up a few key third downs on scrambles in the first half.

Offensively you know just continuing to do what we do in the run game and getting better at what we do and having the ability to continue to get the ball to our playmakers as we did.  Also, just protect the football. I think that's what the game is all about. It's about the ball and not giving them a chance to have a short field defense. They take pride in sudden-change defense. That's an area we've got to improve on.

I'm excited about the opportunity this week to play in Carter-Finley Stadium and come home. You know as I said after the press conference it's not a one-game season. There are 11 more opportunities.

As an assistant coach at Montana, we lost our first game, and somebody put a For Sale sign in my yard. After that one, we went to the national championship game 15 games later.  When I was an assistant at NIU we lost to Iowa at Soldier Field in the opener, 20-19, and didn't lose another game until the Orange Bowl. So I've been a part of two seasons where we lost our opening game and we had a great year.

We're focused on what we can do this week to beat Marshall and know that there's a ton of football in front of us. I really like the team's response yesterday with our 1-0 philosophy of it's a 24-hour rule, whether you win or you lose. You talk about it, you learn from it, you own your mistakes, you fix them, have a plan to fix them, and you move forward. That's where we're at.

Did you go into the game wanting to play Terronne Prescod with Joe Sculthorpe?

Yes, so we wanted to play Big T. We wanted to play him a lot. He was our left guard and our right tackle, so we were going to have to rotate. We know with Witt and Joe being freshmen, and T being a veteran that could play both, we were going to have a three-man rotation. 

Terronne just missed a lot of fall camp with an illness and just wasn't in game condition to play more than he played. That's kind of why it was the way it was. We're hoping to get a whole game out of him this week.

Is that why Prescod is listed as the starter at right tackle?

You know we thought if we were going to be in a situation from a run-game standpoint, we just felt like T at tackle and Joe at guard gives us the best chance there.

It's not that Witt was bad, it's just those two were just a little better when they were in the game.

Have you seen anyone step up senior-wise?

From a leadership standpoint, it started when I woke up Sunday morning. B.J. Hill had sent out a text to the whole leadership council that the 24-hour rule was in effect... come in ready to move past it and look forward to playing the team we play this week. 

I thought the whole team bought into that. You know I talked to the team yesterday. One of our team goals is to maintain our 1-0 philosophy and that means win or lose you move on to the next game. I think we learned from last year that we let a game beat us more than once.

I think that can happen with success and failure. I think that's part of growing up, is you've got to learn how to handle both.  Now that we're into the season, it's five days of prep and play,  five days of prep and play.  

I think that's the best part of what's going on now.  These guys have learned how important it is just to move on one one way or the other.

You mentioned Doc's ties to here. What's it like to go back to an area where you have strong ties?

You know it depends on how long you've been gone. He hasn't coached here in a while so it's not like he's coached any of the players on our team. One of my first games as a head coach at Northern Illinois we played Wisconsin, and I recruited half the guys that were on that team and that was really hard. Just seeing them and watching you know all that. It's emotional.

It's a little different when you coach against a team you were at and you don't know anyone on the team... you didn't coach with the coaches.

I know he's going to have friends in Raleigh and maybe in the administration maybe in the Wolfpack Club and all that, but it's not as personal to our roster or staff like you could be if he had just been here.

Jaylen Samuels caught 15 catches last game. Will he get the ball that often during the game or is a product of the passing volume?

That's a good question. You know I think part of it is how many snaps you get. Obviously, if you get 60 plays you're not going to get the ball that many times... 100 plays are more opportunities.

I guess that's 15 percent of the plays... I don't know if it'll be that high.  I'd like to say that he's going to touch it 10 times a game, but I can't guarantee that obviously based on how people defend us.

Update on Mike Stevens...

Mike looked great yesterday. He was running around, backpedaling. He's ahead of schedule.

I don't think he'll play this week, but we should have him for Furman.

Update on the depth situation at linebacker and nickelback...

Riley Nicholson got dinged on the first kickoff of the game. And so unless they tell me otherwise I don't think he'll play this week. We should have him back after that. It wasn't a major injury, but they thought he'd be at least a week.

I know you guys know that Airius can play Will and Mike, but Louis [Acceus] is listed as the backup we know Airius can swing over.  Brock Miller and Pratt can also play Will and nickel.

The depth chart is listed to show two people but there are guys that can play multiple positions for us within our scheme.

How did Shawn Boone play on Saturday?

Shawn played two positions in the game, and he had a key sack. You know there was one coverage where he should have been deeper which would have helped us on a play-action pass, but I thought he was pretty steady. He tackled well and played different positions against an offense that does quite a bit of things. 

I thought he did his job well, and I know he'll tell you there are things he wants to work on.

Related to Will Richardson, what goes with your thought process to disciplining a player because obviously Will has had strikes. How do you come to those decisions?

Some of them are not my decision. Some of them there's certain rules within the athletic department where if this happens, this happens.  Those ones I don't decide on. 

The way I do it is every kid's different and every situation is going to be studied and looked at. There are certain things that are cut and dry.  If you steal something on our football team you're gone. Zero tolerance. I'm not going to tolerate it.

If there are felony things that happen that's an athletic department thing and they're automatically suspended. Certain things like that happen automatically. There are things that happen on campus where student conduct may do something before I even find out about it.

Programmatically, I've always looked at it like my job is to bring young men here and make them into the football players that they can be, help them graduate from the university with a degree that they want and help me become great men. Along that process, there's going to be growing pains at times.

In Will's situation, if he makes a mistake and I feel like it's a mistake he can learn from and become better for it... there's remorse there and he still has the respect of his coaches and his teammates then that's something I'm willing to sit down and listen to. Sometimes you'll sit down with the person that makes a mistake and you can tell he's going to make excuses and there's no remorse. He's going to do it again. That's where you cut ties. Sometimes it's just a situation where I ask myself or I ask our staff is this somebody that we want around our team now... is this someone that we can trust?  If everyone says no, it's pretty cut and dry.

It's not always cut and dry. Sometimes it takes a while to get all the information you need. Sometimes that information isn't always given to you right away. I wish it was an easier answer, but it's not.

With the struggles in the running game, will there be any looks to try and get Jalan McClendon more involved?

I don't think the struggles in the run game will be fixed if all of a sudden you put in somebody else a quarterback. It always starts with how you block, and we've got to do a better job. Obviously, in some negative run plays, it hurt us.  We had some TFLs and sacks that take away from the rushing yardage. We've got to get rid of those negative plays.

Jalan is somebody that we respect and think highly of.  Is he totally out of the offense? The answer is no. Do we need to put him in to fix our run game? The answer is no.

We just need to get better doing what we do, and I'm not trying to be hard-headed either. There's a lot of things that coach Ledford feels we can do better. In football, everyone would agree that the teams that go from week one, week two, week three, generally get better if they focus on the details of why they're not executing.

What we're not going to do is every time something doesn't work, let's come up with something new.  Pretty soon you're not an offense anymore. You're not a defense. You're the defense of the week or the offense of the week.  That's not us.

We believe in stretch, we believe in inside zone. We're going to block them, and we're going to run them, and we're going to do a lot of formations with tempo and motions. That's what we do.

Do you have an update on Jumichael Ramos?

He practiced last week. He was out for a while prior to that because he was a little sore. We're hopeful this week... I don't know if you'll see him on offense. Obviously, our receivers are pretty good, and it's not because he's not healthy that he's not out there. You're taking Kelvin off the field, or you're taking Jay Sam off the field to put him in.  That doesn't make sense all the time.

C.J. Riley also played pretty good way too for his first game.

Jumichael will hopefully be on some special teams this week, and that's something I visited with him about yesterday to get him back in the game flow and see if that can help him get on the field there.

The receivers stay late after practice. Is that starting to pay off?

I think George McDonald has really created a really good culture in that room with those kids. They love to work. They love the way he teaches them.

Look at Jakobi Myers. I don't know how much you paid attention to his build, how much better he looks.  That's a kid's commitment in the weight room, but it's also coach McDonald bringing him along and getting him to believe that if he does those things that he can have success and he did.  Other than the one drop, he had a pretty good game.

If you go out to the field and everyone leaves and you stick around, you're going to see that group... you're going to see other groups as well that like to stay after work on little things.

What is the process for selecting the Leadership Council?

Every position group votes for two people in their group, and then we tally the votes.  So each position group, unless it's a specialist... they usually only have one, but this year there's two in there. It's because of the size of their group.

You have two representatives from each group, and then we meet with those kids once a week to talk about the team and where they're out and if there's things that we can help them with. Are things that they'd like us to know?

We have a message group that we send each other inspirational things to talk about with the team and you know different things as kids read a lot as do a lot of the coaches on our staff and they're sharing different motivational things with those kids so they can help them cultivate that in their rooms. 

We'll ask them from time-to-time make sure your position group understands this and then it's their job to deliver those messages.

Tim Kidd-Glass came in and played for Dexter Wright with Dexter dinged up. How did Tim do and how is Dexter?

First of all, I thought Tim did a great job when he came in. He graded out higher than Dexter did. You know he wasn't in there as long, but I thought he did a good job. He communicated well, he fit in the run game where he was supposed to fit... he was in the right places.

He didn't make a lot of plays, but they weren't there to make on his side of the field at times. You didn't notice that you had a young kid in the game. He's a sophomore and he played on special teams as a true freshman last year.

Dexter just tweaked is growing a little bit. I don't know if he's 50 percent or 100 percent. I haven't met with the training staff yet today, but he was walking around yesterday during the walk-through and it seemed like he was feeling pretty good so hopefully, he'll be back this week.