Love Ciarrocca’s upbeat attitude about being excited to see his offense on the field.
Ferentz talked about Gophers in his press conference...Hawkeyes are well aware of who #13 is, overall strong WR group, Annexstad ability to deliver the ball to them.
FERENTZ QUOTES:
I think as we come into the game probably a lot of similarities between both teams right now. Same record, 3-1, both looking for our first Big Ten Conference win and both teams coming off a bye week. I'm sure they'll be prepared and hopefully we will be too.
Obviously it's a rivalry game. And I think we probably play for the best trophy there is in college football. Floyd is certainly a great, great trophy. Floyd of Rosedale is one of the great traditions in college football, and our players get to experience that, so it's really kind of a neat thing, and I'm sure they feel the same way.
Minnesota is a team we expect to be motivated. Certainly they're well-coached and on top of that they'll be playing at home. We've got a big challenge in that regard.
And just circling back to what I said a minute ago, really what it gets down to we've got to play hard. You have to play hard every conference game. But we've got to play a little cleaner, a little smarter, a little better if we're going to get a victory in conference play.
So that's really where our focus is right now. It's our first road trip. We need to be extremely focused, and we'll remind our players that's really the key anytime you go on the road and certainly will be Saturday going into a tough environment.
Q. How important is it to you to inform your team about the Floyd of Rosedale, and how much do you talk about it?
FERENTZ: We'll have somebody give a report on it tomorrow, give a little bit more information, detailed information than I can provide. But, yeah, uh-huh. And I always kind of go back to my experiences. My first one was 1981 out there. I'm pretty sure we were ranked. We were on CBS TV.
And my memory is getting a little bad here, but we were -- Sports Illustrated was at the game, which never happened back then. If you're on TV it never happened either. And we got real tight and didn't play very well. I think we lost 12-10 or 12-whatever it was. And I had a holding penalty; I remember that distinctly down in the end zone.
What I do remember is when they came across to get Floyd. We had Floyd in our possession. They won the game. And they came across and those are the things you remember.
Once you get into a rivalry game like this, you understand what the trophy's all about, and so I think those are the things that our older guys talk about with younger guys and all of us as coaches share that.
Q. When you were recruiting Amani were you surprised that you were maybe the only Power Five program that seemed interested in him? Did that seem interesting to you?
COACH FERENTZ: A little bit, a little bit. And he was not a strong student in high school. That was probably a factor. We were going to be patient there. We felt after getting to know Amani and his parents that there wasn't a big risk there.
Q. I think you guys get to expand to 74 on the travel roster. How are you going to address that?
COACH FERENTZ: We're still looking for the next 14 to fill it out. So we're not just going to fill seats up. And maybe that hurts us in recruiting or will hurt us in recruiting, I don't know. But the guys get on a bus on Friday, will have a purpose to go. And we've got to make sure they've got a role. And we've kind of done that. I think we can take 74 to the hotel here. We're saving money for the university, doing our part to be fiscally responsible. But we get on the bus with guys that are going to have a role. We might travel a redshirt quarterback. That's been pretty common. But we're not going on a field trip up there, we're not going to be taking cameras and stuff like that. We're going to go up there to hopefully win a football game. And guys that have a role will be on the bus and kind of go from there. If we can find 74, I'll be really happy. That would be really great.
Q. And the challenges any of them face against Tyler Johnson, big strong, athletic guy?
COACH FERENTZ: I didn't talk much about them. But to me, if you're going to start with their football team, it's not just him. He's a really good player. But it is also the receiving corps. And we played an outfit like that a couple weeks ago, I thought Wisconsin's receiver corps is pretty good too. Now we're facing another group that's really good as well.
And the freshman, 13, they go to him a lot, too. It's not like you've just got one guy to focus on. They've got a whole group that's capable. But those two guys can do some damage and have already done damage in four games.
Q. They have a true freshman QB who is --
COACH FERENTZ: He knows enough to throw. That's one thing he knows. He may not be experienced enough, but he knows that much, yeah.
Q. That must be kind of rare in this league to have somebody who can walk in like that and earn his way on to the field and play pretty good.
COACH FERENTZ: It is. Like I said, he knows where to go with the ball. He throws it down both sidelines. They throw other stuff, too. Not just that. But they do a nice job of throwing deep balls. And both those guys are really dangerous in a lot of areas but also on those streak routes down the sideline.
On his youth: I think the nice thing, they're all young players that will continue to get better, too, and it's kind representative of our football team. That's one thing I'm excited about, I think we have a real window of opportunity here over the next eight weeks, if we do things right in practice well.
