What Notre Dame OC Gerad Parker said about targeting Mitchell Evans more
Notre Dame offensive coordinator Gerad Parker spoke to reporters Tuesday evening. Here’s what he had to say.
On drawing up more plays for junior tight end Mitchell Evans:
“Yeah, it’s like anything, I think that as a guy develops and you see things happen, you better. So it’s our job, my job to make sure the guys that can make plays for us and we believe in, you better do that, especially as the year progresses. So we’ve gotta make sure we find ways now to where there’s a target number that we have to get him to, because he’s been too valuable and he’s too good at making plays vertically down the field for us not to.”
On if he saw Evans playing like this at Notre Dame coming:
“I’m gonna be totally honest. Yes. This isn’t an accident. He has A-plus ball skills, he was a high school quarterback, he’s a great route-runner, he’s got good top-end speed. There’s reasons. And so it wouldn’t be a surprise, but there was a pretty good player here before him. Sometimes that kind of keeps that thing sheltered a little bit before it comes out. So I wouldn’t be surprised at all, but he deserves what he’s getting and he’s put himself in by a skill set that allows him to.”
On several Notre Dame pre-snap penalties against Duke:
“The deal is, have we had an issue? No. So then you’re trying to make sure everything is good, but we had an issue and you can’t ignore it. So the root cause is, being in that type of environment certainly had a factor in this. So not to give away what we have to change — obviously develop what we’re going to with our cadence and how we’ll snap the football, but we have to adjust some things and make sure we can operate in a hostile environment, which is happening Saturday night. So we will change, and how we change would be fair to be off-record.”
On the difference between the Duke and North Carolina State games in regard to pre-snap penalties:
“No, we didn’t have a different approach. I would say there was one piece of it that was different. Again, I wouldn’t want to discuss on record, but there was a difference, so it taught us a lesson. And, after the storm, it wasn’t near as rowdy. And then we got the noise turned down by how we played and finished the game. So you hope you can operate that way and turn the noise down as you play. But it’s gonna be loud early and we know that, and we gotta adjust some plays to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
On Notre Dame wide receivers coach Chansi Stuckey:
“Stuck has done an unbelievable job changing the culture of that room. He just has, in how we caught balls over the summer, how we pushed our details to show up on time and be where we gotta be in our route details. Do we have plenty of work to do? Absolutely. But Stuck, it starts there.”
