Pat Narduzzi Press Conference: Previewing Cal

PAT NARDUZZI: Had a good weekend. I think kids played their tails off. I couldn’t be more proud of the way our guys play with effort. Like, we emphasize it all the time but our kids play hard for four quarters.

As you guys know, they never give up, from first year to 10th year they are going to give you everything they’ve got. That’s what I love about them.

Wins are hard, and wins on the road are even harder. My hat goes off to them.

I think North Carolina is a good football team. If they keep their heads up they’ll win a lot of football games.

Some of the things that kind of stood out to me, again, there’s always the good and the bad. There’s the bad, obviously, is what we focus on as coaches unfortunately.

But some of the good was they only had four explosive gains. To me anytime we hold someone four or less explosive gains, we’re 70 percent win. We’ve got a 70 percent chance of winning. And we held them to four and I think that’s two weeks in a row. Maybe three weeks in a row that we’ve done that.

But anytime you can hold people, and again of the four they got, we kind of gave it to them because we had some mental errors on the plays. It’s not coming down to physical where we physically, man, they had a great play — we physically just couldn’t handle it.

There’s some mental stuff we’ve got to straighten out and get right, either take away the ability to be able to do some of the things we’re doing or get them to do it the right way.

And offensively we had nine. Again our goal was to get nine or more. We got nine. Again, we’re 70 percent win when we have nine explosive plays. Those are the good things.

I think the other thing you look at is doesn’t matter what happens on first down or second down, what happens on money down. We emphasize that. I thought it was a key we talked about one of the key victories, was winning money down. Doesn’t matter what happens on first and second down, but money down you better win.

You look at the numbers we’re way, way above the average. We have some lofty goals, I forget offensively and defensively what they are. I want to say defensively we want to be 70 percent win on third down-and-three-plus. I think we were 70 percent win. Again, money down now includes with as many fourth downs as you’re…