UNCUT: Andy Kotelnicki on Jalon Daniels, Iowa State, the OL

Andy Kotelnicki broke down several topics as the offense gets ready to play Iowa State. he talked about Jalon Daniels, facing Iowa State's 3-3-5 scheme and much more.

You’re a quarter way through the season how do you feel about the offense?

Well, they're progressing, they're improving. As a coach and a teacher, I always think being a part of a program that puts so much emphasis on preparation and the process and doing things the right way. I said one of the biggest indicators of our growth is probably how we're approaching practices during the week. To see us going out there, putting together practices and growing with our want to go out there and improve.

And as we add, and we evolve as I've talked every week about how you have to evolve every week as an offense. And for our guys to be able to do that with open arms and a mindset that says, ‘Okay, let's do this.’ I'm real pleased with the direction they're going. Got to keep doing it. I said this last week, but every week, it just gets harder and harder and harder, and it gets more important and requires more urgency. And so, you just got to keep stacking that stuff together.

On Jalon Daniels:

He still approaches every day with, ‘I want to get better.’ And so, diving into what the game plan is, the calls, protection checks, all those kind of things, the details that you have to be really well versed on week to week because it resets every week. You play new defense. You play your game plan. Like I said, it'll evolve. It'll change based off of who you're playing. And so, he comes in every Sunday and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday with the idea of, ‘Okay. Today, what are we doing to get better?’ We talk about it all the time when our meeting's called- it's called tilling for snakes. Worked for a guy way back in the day who was with Hayden Fry for all those years at Iowa and he said Hayden Fry used to say all the time. He said we're tilling for snakes, we're looking for some small detail, some small, minute thing that gets us all on the same page that helps us win a football game on one snap. Because you never know when that one snaps going to come up. So his constant tilling for those snakes, his constant drilling for, ‘Okay, what about this? How are we going to handle this? What do you want here? Okay.’ He continues to do that every week.

Have things opened up so you can call any type of offense you want?

Right now we stay within the framework of things that we train our guys to do. You have to be careful of that. And I think we've discussed that before. One of the hardest things is to predict, right? Last January when we're going to evaluate who we were going to be in the fall, week one, to week 6, to week 12, you have to predict that. Because the spring reps that you're about to take are going to directly impact what you trained your guys to do.

So, you have fall camp and you have spring football are so critical about what your identity is. You don't want to miss in those situations. And we've been lucky. And so in the sense that we've been able to predict the right way, I think. But you have to always add and evolve, and you add tweaks and you look for inspiration, or other ways to make sure that you're moving forward as an offense. And like I said, you're not being stale and you're not doing the same things over and over again.

What type of challenge does Iowa State bring?

Structurally it's different. So, you have to make sure everyone's on the same page about where and what direction they're going, and who and how they're blocking and how things are being identified. And when you line up the way they line up, they can be really multiple, they can give one look to start the snap and then as the ball is getting snapped it could look completely different. And so we've prepared for it well, you know what I mean? Through years past and the off season, I think the guys are doing a really good job and they have a good understanding of what it is, and how they're trying to fit things and the coverages they're playing behind it, but they got a good team and their defense is good. So structurally it's a little bit different. It's really multiple. I like to think they're saying the same things about us. And so you have two multiple looking groups going against each other and it's going to be about the group that can play with the most discipline and play fast. And I like how our guys are preparing. So it's a challenge. It's a unique challenge for sure.

How are you making a complex offense easy on the linemen. The OL say it is a simple offense to block in.

Well, Socrates I think, said simplicity is the greatest form of sophistication. Everything starts from the ball out for us. We want the guys in that line of scrimmage to make sure that they don't have to have a bunch of stress. What we've discussed and we talked about as a staff is that when you look at positions on the offense, the group that probably has the most post snap variables, the fastest, so these variables that are going to occur and how fast they happen, other than the quarterback, it's the offensive line.

Because you're in this little box right here and this guy could go from here to here really fast. So, post snap variables and how fast they happen. It seems logical to us as teachers, that we should make sure that their pre-snap variables are minimized as much as possible. Right now the inverse, the group that has probably the fewest post snap variables that happen, at least in terms of time, the slowest tend to be a little bit further away from the ball.