Big Ten Teleconference Quotes from Brady Hoke

Another Big Ten Teleconference was held on Tuesday. Earlier this morning it was announced that Notre Dame is cancelling games with Michigan from 2015-17, meaning the final meeting in the foreseeable future between the Wolverines and Irish will be in the 2014 season.

Here is a collection of some of the quotes from Michigan’s Brady Hoke during Tuesday’s teleconference. I forgot to hit record for the Mark Dantonio portion of the call, but will add his comments when the replay is put online. My apologies for that.

Brady Hoke

Opening thoughts on last week: Obviously coming off a hard-fought game in South Bend on Saturday night. We had some opportunities. Give Notre Dame credit, they played good football. We’ve got to take care of the football better. We’ve got to execute better on both sides of the ball. Our team will take this week and we will get better in fundamentals and techniques and we will get ready for the Big Ten season.

Does having a bye week prior to Big Ten play help: Bye weeks are so tricky, to some degree, and what you want to get accomplished each year and your team’s are all different; the maturity of your team, the youth of your team. I think for us, at this point, I would say it’s a good time for us to re-evaluate where we are at and re-evaluate some of the personnel and, also, to get better as a football team from a standpoint of playing your position and doing your job.

On the defense: I think we were better last week. We have to continue that trend. I thought the effort and the demeanor that our defense played with during the course of the game was, really, kept us in the football game. We’ve got to improve upon that. You’ve got to make plays when the opportunity is there and we, unfortunately, didn’t do that a couple times.

On Notre Dame opting out of the agreement with Michigan: My reaction is they are doing…Notre Dame made a decision. That’s not our decision. Dave (Brandon) told me on Sunday about what was going to happen. It’s unfortunate and it’s a great rivalry and all those things, but they have to do what they think is best. We’ll move on and it adds some new scheduling opportunities for us.

On Devin Gardner’s injury states: He’s fine.

On scheduling and the importance of strength of schedule: I think we have done a pretty good job here at scheduling. Obviously, the national rivalry with Notre Dame, when that was on the schedule, your strength of schedule was pretty good. We opened up with Alabama this year and played Air Force, which is a good Mountain West team. I think that is all part of it.

On the struggles of the Big Ten: One thing is, first and foremost, I think we have a great conference. A great conference from many standpoints. From the academic standpoint of the universities that are in this conference to the competitiveness to the student-athletes and how they react. Do we want to play better? There is no question. I don’t think there is a coach in America that doesn’t want to play better no matter what your record is. I think our conference will continue to be as good a conference as there is and I think the coaches and the student-athletes work very hard.