Skip Holtz Defense Quotations

When Chris Johnson runs for three yards, it makes you a little concern. I don't know if we are creating huge holes for them. We have to look at it and try to figure out what the problem is. This is a defense that plays a shell and will make you get four, five or six and say in a 80-yard drive you will shoot yourself in the foot. That worries me because we have had a tendency to shoot ourselves with mistakes.

Every time that you try to do something to hurt him, (Dunn) has got an answer with something that he is going to do. He plays a high-pressure defense where he puts a lot of pressure on the quarterback, and they try to put a lot of pressure on the offensive line as far as assignments are concerned. On top of that, the athletes that he has running around in that scheme right now make them pretty darn good defensively.

Coming into this one ... I would say I would like to be able to say that we're probably going to open it up a lot more than we did in our opening game, and utilize a little bit more of the offense. I just want to make sure we protect the ball and don't do anything foolish. I don't want to turn the ball over and put our defense in bad field position.

It will be a great challenge for us to stop them on offense. I think our defense has a good grasp on what we are trying to do, now it's time to go out and execute in a real game.

This was a big scrimmage for us today in terms of evaluating players. We ran around 100 plays and came away virtually healthy. I wanted to find out if our players could stay focused when they became tired and hot and not have any mental busts. Our staff wanted to see where we stood heading into the preparation of Duke. It's safe to say that right now our defense is well ahead of the offense.