The comment was in response to a question(s) on the Sunday night media call... There are only so many ways you can respond to the same question(s) each time they are asked.
DAY AFTER CALL: HC Randy Edsall’s Assessment After The 49-7 Loss To Cincinnati | This is UConn Country
>>LEARNING TO PLAY TOGETHER AS A TRUE DEFENSIVE UNIT:
“That’s one of the things that we’ve been talking about. Today, they watched the film as units to go over those things. One of the things that we need to continually do, we can’t coach these kids, we have to teach them because to me, there’s too many of them that don’t know how to play the game of football. They don’t understand situations. They don’t understand the big picture, with how everything evolves. A lot of them aren’t taught that, they don’t come in here and when you have young guys and other guys that haven’t come from programs where the fundamentals and the techniques have been taught, that’s what we have to do. We have to teach them everything, from A to Z. From football, how to practice and how to do all those things. That’s something we need to continue to do a good job of and do a better job of with these guys. In the long run, it will all pay off. Right now, we have to go through the pain of doing those things. In the long run, we are going to be fine. I took some guys now that I’m not going to play anymore as freshmen, they know what they will need to do to play and be successful at this level. Now we’ll let them get bigger and stronger because some of these guys weren’t big enough and strong enough coming in here, but we needed them to play. Now, after four games, some of them I’m not playing anymore, they are going to just redshirt, they are going to get extra lifting in and then in the long run, we’ll be better off down the road when we can play fifth year seniors, just like a lot of other teams do. Again, this is a developmental program. This isn’t a program that is going to have, shouldn’t have and won’t have guys coming in here and playing right away. What you want to do is develop guys. As you develop them, they have that experience, strength and knowledge because they’ve been taught the game. They’ll have good role models and I’m not saying anything bad about any of our guys, but they’ll have role models teaching them how to do it the UConn way right from the very beginning when they get here.”
HAVING TO LEARN THE GAME OF FOOTBALL, IS THAT INDICATIVE OF THE TYPE OF COACHING PLAYERS ARE GETTING AT THE HIGH SCHOOL LEVEL?:
“Football is a lot different at this level. There are really good high school coaches out there, I’m not saying that. I’m not saying there aren’t good high school coaches, there are good high school coaches, but at this level, the amount of work and amount of preciseness that goes into it and the understanding of everything, they don’t get to spend as much time with these kids in high school. The terminology and depth of what you might go into is different at this level. It’s a learning curve, it’s a process that kids need to go through to be able to pick that stuff up and do it. That’s one thing. We are in a program where we need to develop those guys. We don’t select, we recruit. What we have to do is develop those guys, so when you look at the whole package of guys coming in. Just go back and look, our success came from redshirting a bunch of guys and developing them, playing with fifth year seniors, that’s where your success lies in a program like ours. We aren’t an Alabama, we aren’t that type of school.”<<
I bet @ this point in the season Edsall would just like to shut up and Coach.
