Notes and Quotes From Tom Allen's Media Monday: Week Eight
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Written by Andrew Walker
Tom Allen was the first to take the podium after Indiana’s complete domination of the Rutgers Scarlet Knights, 35-0.
Notes:
Players of the week:
Offense: Whop Philyor, Stevie Scott
Defense: Demarcus Elliott, Khalil Bryant
Special Teams: Reese Taylor
Scout Team: O: Luke Shayotovich D: Jordan Jusevitch, Jeremy Boyd ST: Connor Thomas, Ryan Barnes
Injury News:
- “A'Shon Riggins is no longer going to be playing football for us. Just had a lot of injuries that have mounted for him,” said Allen. He won’t be participating for the rest of the season.
- On Hunter Littlejohn: “We obviously watched him limp off the field, so just a lower leg injury, don't think it's serious. But any time with linemen, they don't heal as quickly as skill guys sometimes with lower leg injuries, but just be doing his rehab, and we'll get him out there as much as possible, and he'll get ready, but I expect him to play. He's a toughy.”
Tom Allen Quotes:
On being consistent through the season:
We talked today about it's so critical to be consistent in your preparation, and that to me is the message because that allows you to do the little things right at critical times, and that's how you perform at a high level. When the chips are down and the game's on the line, which is what we have to do.
As you said, we get into consistent Big Ten play, playing teams that it's going to be four quarter games and coming down to the final series of the game. It's the consistency in your preparation. It's the consistency in your execution that's going to allow us to get a consistent result. And that to me is really the very strong message that we talked about today and we'll continue to talk about.
That's what I want to see. We're still a young enough team that the struggle is the consistency, and the mindset and the way you do the things you need to do. We're talking about, even with our guys, is the consistency of how you prepare to play. What's your pregame rituals? How do you go through this process? We've got a lot of young guys.
On Stevie Scott’s recent success:
Be patient because there's no doubt, you come into the season, you rush for all those yards as a freshman, kind of come out of nowhere. Everybody talks about you the whole off-season. You come up, and it continues with this part of it, and you've got to learn how to handle it. Then the first few games are harder because everybody is just loading the box, and they were.
So to me, it's about -- he's always been so great. That's the thing I love about Stevie. He's like, Coach, I'm good. It's going to come. He gets that. But then I think he kind of pressed a little bit. We had even Coach Hart about him just being patient in his running. Not trying to create the big runs. Let him come to you.
Just do what you're supposed to do and let the system play itself out. So I think you started to see more of that here recently, and that just to me is part of him being patient and our offense getting better as they get more and more comfortable with Coach DeBoer's system and how he's doing and how he calls things.
That's what we have to do. It's a grit piece, a stay the course piece, and perseverance and doing the right things over and over and over again. That's the same thing I said to Stevie. Just keep doing what you're doing. Get better and better. Keep paying attention to the details in your preparation, how you practice, how you play. He just stayed with it, and now he's starting to get some open field.
On defensive success and winning mentality:
First of all, we've worked really hard here to build a culture. I think that's what you see. There's no doubt. We had a couple games here that we didn't play to our standard defensively, and that was very upsetting to me. I take it personal. Even the first game with our tackling, just all those kinds of things. But it's just trying to stay with it to be able to get -- this is how we're going to play. You step on this football field and you represent our defense, this is how we're going to play, whether you're one, two, or three. We challenge our guys about that all the time.
I thought Saturday was just a good exhibition of just good, fundamentally sound football defensively and playing with fanatical effort. Just I think it's recruiting, more good players, got more depth, more guys trying to get a lot of those reps so we keep guys fresh throughout the season, and then be able to play. It's all leading up to what we're about to get into. So that's what we're working towards.
On his road game prep in his third season
I think that, as you get more comfortable with where -- we've been to Maryland before. We've stayed at this hotel. A little more comfortable with the schedule itself. I think I just try to do a really good job of creating routines for our guys, and you have so many -- the comfort level being at home is helpful, and I think it eliminates certain things. I want to be a team that travels well, that we know -- we talk about it being a business trip. From the perspective of we're only here for one reason and one reason only. They know exactly what that reason is.
So everything is geared around that. To be able to have a systematic way of how we practice that day before we leave and check out here, and you always go to the indoor facility, if we're flying, which we usually do. We're going to be flying through this one and the whole process of going through, when we get to the hotel, what do we do and how do we handle it? And the meetings and the flow and the comfort level, to me, it's consistent preparation and making sure our guys are locked in and all the little things you have to do to get yourself ready based on what the kickoff time happens to be and have a schedule based off of that
That, to me, is kind of what I've learned. It's all about the flow of where you're headed. Any time you go somewhere brand new. It will be different as we go to Nebraska because we've not been there before since I've been here. All that stuff, you just adjust and make it as much to the routine as you possibly can because it's about you've got to play well on the road.