Spaulding Report: UCLA Football Indiana Week Media Interviews
As you wait for tomorrow's game to kickoff, we've gathered all of this week's UCLA Football interviews for you in one place.
As usual, we’ll get right to this week’s interviews and see what’s been getting said at this week’s UCLA football press conferences. I’m just going to share this week’s videos here all in the same place to make it easy for you to watch them if you haven’t already. The videos in this article are courtesy of UCLA Athletics on YouTube, unless noted otherwise.
This week’s interviews were a little different from past weeks. This week, three of the four interviews were with coaches. Of course, we have Tim Skipper from Monday. Then, Coach Meat was up on Tuesday along with his son Cole Martin who has been shining in the UCLA secondary. Then, finally, we get to hear from Kevin Coyle for the first time since he came to Westwood.
As is the custom, we’ll start off with interim head coach Tim Skipper who met with the media on Monday. Ben Bolch got to start as is typical. He asked about injury updates but Skipper indicated that guys would be checked out that day. So, he offered no update on Nico’s status after his injury last Saturday against Maryland.
Bolch also asked about the biggest upset he had been a part of and he told a story about losing to Hawai’i his freshman year at Fresno State and then having to play a ranked Air Force team. He spoke about how they pulled off the upset of the Falcons.
A little later, he also addressed the terrible officiating in last week’s game. Rather than complain, he maintained his relentless optimism and spoke about how they need to change and adapt, however the calls go.
With officiating, there’s a lot of judgment calls out there. They don’t care if I agree or disagree. They really don’t. So, all I kind of want is an explanation. Give me an explanation and we have to move on to the next play. That’s really what it all comes down to. Everybody has their own judgment and opinions on things. I just preach to the team and the staff, we always have to overcome and adapt. That’s no matter the calls could go our way, they could go against us. Whatever it is, we need to overcome and adapt and get ready for the next play. And that’s basically how it all went down.
He also indicated that every week, they submit officiating concerns to the league office, but he didn’t go into any detail as to what they were told.
On Tuesday, it was Martin Family Tuesday as both Coach Demetrice Martin aka Coach Meat met with the media for the first time in a while and so did his son Cole.
Coach Meat was asked about what the best part of coaching his son has been. He answered, “The best part about coaching my son is I get to spend father-son time on the field. They say coaching is nothing but teaching. I get to be a teacher and do fatherhood stuff through football instead of books. So, teaching on the field.”
While Coach Meat clearly appreciates being able to spend time on the field with his son, Cole spoke about their relationship being more coach-player than father-son on the field. Cole explained, “[The best part of playing for my dad has been] being able to get pushed by him. He’s one of those guys who…he’s a coach first on the on the field. It’s not a father-son relationship. It’s more of a coach-player relationship and it’s been huge because it elevates my game on a tremendous level.”
Things looked a little dicey around Nico on Wednesday as Bolch tweeted that he wasn’t on the field initially, but later he had another tweet that updated the fact that Iamaleava was, in fact, practicing.
Then, Kevin Coyle met with the media for the first time.
One of the questions he was asked was about his defensive philosophy. Coyle responded:
“We’re going to try to give the offense multiple looks in our attempts to defend stop the running game like everybody talks about. We’re going to do that by changing up the front, changing up the coverage, having run blitzes that we call on first and second down, coupled with an effective third down package that mixes everything. It mixes man coverage, zone coverage, different types of pressures. We can pressure every which way but loose, to be honest with you. whether it’s zero, whether it’s uh man-to-man, whether it’s fire zone, whether it’s uh different 2D modified…simulated pressures as people call them nowadays. So, we’ve got quite a volume of that stuff and we try to look at the opponent, look at how they protect, how they deploy their receivers, and where we can gain an advantage. So, I think our defense is multiple, but we try to start with the premise that we have to stop people from running the football effectively.”
Go Bruins!!!
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