Northwestern's on a funky practice schedule this week, so the media talked to Pat Fitzgerald at 12:30 today. Here are the best notes and quotes from that interview:
- On Mike Jensen: "I introduced (Mike Jensen) when he spoke to the team in training camp and my introduction was, hey here's a little walk-on guy who got into school here, good for Mike. We had him at DB. He had terrible hips, terrible feet, couldn't cover anybody. We moved him over to wide receiver — he can't catch — who is this guy?"
- Fitz noted that they took notice of Jensen's consistent play on special teams, and that's how he made a name for himself on the team.
- Fitz said the heat made practice difficult for NU earlier this week. There won't be that issue in Berkeley.
- On the routine for night games: "We'll push some meetings back to Saturday morning. We'll do a walk-through on Saturday morning at the hotel. On Saturdays, that's typically what we do for night games. And then we'll have some down time, have time for guys to take a nap, like we've built in this week. At 7:30 kick, pregame meal is at 3:30."
- On Friday walk-throughs: "I'm not a believer in that Friday walk-through slap-dick around ball that you see a lot of teams do coming to your stadium. Linemen playing 7-on-7 and all that slap-dick stuff, I'm not a fan of that.We will go in the stadium Friday. If we can go in the stadium, great, if not we'll go in the locker room and stretch our legs out — whatever their rules are."
- On Friday walk-throughs: "We've done it in all kinds of places. We've done it on the pool deck, we've done it on the parking lot. There's a really nice parking lot at the hotel at Purdue that we've done it at, interstate running right by. We've done it in a lot of areas. We've done it outside and all of the sudden rain started and we had to go inside."
- On preparing for Cal for so long: "You can get some paralysis by analysis with all this time. I'll have to be all over the coaches a little bit. It's this and bowl games, you've just got too much time on your hands to worry about a bunch of stuff."