Head Coach Mike Macdonald Recaps The Week 1 Win vs. Patriots

Mike Macdonald (0:01)

All right, good to see everybody. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_2 (0:07)

How's Sam doing, Mike?

Mike Macdonald (0:12)

No update, honestly, from earlier. So, but it's been positive news. So right now, I think we're just working through the extent of the injury and then putting a plan in place to get back rocking and rolling. So it is silver lining as we have some extra time here. We'll kind of get things back up and running on Monday, actual Monday, calendar Monday, not football Monday. Actually, it will be Monday. We'll be back, okay? It will be a football Monday and a calendar Monday.

So hopefully by then, we'll have a really accurate picture of plan of attack and what we'll do that week.

Brady (0:54)

Is he back in the building now?

Mike Macdonald (0:55)

He was back today, yeah.

SPEAKER_2 (0:56)

Have you talked to him to gauge like demeanor, just kind of how he's seeing?

Mike Macdonald (1:00)

We've texted back and forth, but I haven't seen him, but I know he's here right now.

SPEAKER_4 (1:05)

Just to confirm what you said on the radio, you said it's a muscle thing.

Mike Macdonald (1:08)

Yeah.

I'd tell you more, but I don't know more. It's around here. It's around the hip. I don't think there's a hip muscle, but there is there. I don't know.

Brady (1:22)

High school science class skeleton.

Mike Macdonald (1:25)

I probably should do that from moving forward. Bring it out every time there's a question.

SPEAKER_5 (1:28)

Mike, on the seven pre-snap penalties, was anything you saw in film any familiar theme, or there's just seven?

Mike Macdonald (1:35)

Yeah. Well, we've talked about it, and I think we have a cool plan of attack process-wise, but I think, I don't know if it's good or bad, but it's kind of multiple reasons.

You know, so if it was just one thing, we could hit the one-thing button and attack that, but I think it's kind of everything right now, so not a bad way. It's just like one thing here, one thing there, so let's just go back to the fundamentals, go back to the basics, how we practice, how we get all the calls in, how we motion and shift, all that type of stuff. It's not panic, you know, but it's definitely something that we want to attack and address.

SPEAKER_5 (2:11)

You talked about one, week one, that you don't know what other teams are going to do. Now that you've got some film for someone like you next to Tinker, what does that do for you going to game two?

Mike Macdonald (2:23)

Still not much. Until you get out of the first quarter of the season, teams really haven't declared themselves.

The systems that we face this year are different than the systems that we saw last year pretty significantly. So really on both sides of the ball. So I think for the first quarter of the season, it'll be much about how we want to improve our individual phases. And then once, I think, teams start to declare how they're operating, things like that, then you can get into some of those type of details.

SPEAKER_6 (2:54)

Now that you've had a chance to watch the All 22 film, what were your thoughts on the way that the run game looked for the four quarters yesterday?

Mike Macdonald (3:02)

I'm really excited about our run game.

I think there's things we want to hit our targets a little bit better, maybe get to some different things operationally, but I thought our guys ran off the ball. I think they tried to finish runs. I think our runners were decisive and got square and got the ball moving forward. We eliminated some negative runs, which is always a positive. So I think we got off to a really good start and I expect us to get even better.

SPEAKER_7 (3:33)

Where's the biggest room for improvement?

Mike Macdonald (3:37)

Well, I think if we can keep drives alive on offense, that will give us some more chances to run it. And more runs will be better.

SPEAKER_5 (3:50)

It seemed like yesterday Chenna was all over the place.

SPEAKER_6 (3:53)

What did you like about the way he was playing yesterday?

Mike Macdonald (3:55)

Chenna is the current shocking belt holder. He had a lot of shocking plays on film. He played a really good game.

He played with anticipation, played ahead of plays, played physically. He was doing a lot of great stuff, so it was great to see. Happy for him.

SPEAKER_8 (4:14)

Where are some players or some plays that stood out to you watching on film that might not have stood out to people just watching the game?