Spaulding Report: UCLA Football Ohio State Week Media Interviews

As you wait for tonight'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.

We’ll start off, like we always do, with interim head coach Tim Skipper.

One of the questions Coach Skip was asked was if he ever cringes when Nico takes off running. In response, he said:

“You could worry about injury all game for every one of the players if you wanted to, but with him, he’s dangerous with the ball in his hands, and he wants the ball in his hands. Like, he wants that. And I think the the contact helps him settle down.

Obviously, he’s your starting quarterback. You don’t want him taking big hits and things like that, but if they’re going to give him running lanes, he might as well take them. Um, I I kid with him all the time. I mean, every now and then you might want to slide a little bit, but you know, when you have a natural runner like he is, you kind of just let them go do their thing.”

Well, it’s probably safe to say that Skipper is wishing Nico slid a little last week, considering that he was concussed and will miss tonight’s game.

This week, running back Anthony Frias and defensive lineman Jacob Busic were the players who met with the media. Ironically, Frias was asked about Nico running the ball. He spoke about Nico’s toughness and his love of the game this way:

“It’s just his character and his mentality. You know it before stepping on the field like the way he talks, the way he is in the locker room, like this guy’s a dog and like he loves football. He doesn’t like…that’s one thing…he doesn’t just love being a quarterback, he loves playing football, and so that’s one of the biggest things that we appreciate out of him. He’s willing to do those things that maybe other quarterbacks in the country aren’t willing to do. So, that’s just grateful. That’s what makes him special to be honest.”

Ben Bolch of the LA Times asked Busic about what UCLA needs to do to get more sacks. Busic said:

“We need to get them to third and long. That’s something that we’ve been emphasizing in practice. We didn’t do a good job with that last week. I don’t know if they had many third and longs at all. We only had a couple opportunities to really get off the rock. We were playing the run. You got to stop the run. You got to earn the right to rush the passer.”

Well, if the Bruins want to win tonight, they will definitely have to earn that right tonight.

Go Bruins!!!

---

Thanks again for supporting The Mighty Bruin. Your paid subscriptions make this site possible. Questions, comments, story ideas, angry missives and more can be sent to to @TheMightyBruin on Twitter.