ESPN College Football

Posted by ESPN.com's Heather Dinich

Every ACC coach has a press conference each week in addition to the Wednesday teleconference, so there is lots being said on Mondays and Tuesdays across the conference. Here are a few highlights from each head coach, starting with the Atlantic Division:

BOSTON COLLEGE

“The main objective was to win and obviously we accomplished that,” coach Frank Spaziani said. “We’re going to take a look at some things and get a better idea on what we have to do to move forward over the course of the season. So we’re through with last week’s game; it’s over with and now we have Kent State coming in. We were on the field with them last year and they gave us all we could handle. They have about 15 starters returning and they returned all their specialists. Obviously they lost a very good quarterback but they have a redshirt freshman that played a lot last year so we obviously have to get better.”

CLEMSON

“Defensively it is all about discipline,” coach Dabo Swinney said about Thursday night’s game against Georgia Tech. “We have to tackle and we have to gang tackle. That is what this game is about, every play you have to be aware of who has the dive, who has the pitch, who has the quarterback. You have to play unselfish and disciplined football to have a chance defensively against a team like this.

“They will have 0 yards, 0 yards, 1 yard, 2 yards, 3 yards, -1 yard, and then 50 yards. We have to be very disciplined for 60 minutes. We can’t have lulls, everybody has to do their job.”

FLORIDA STATE

“We probably out 'mistaked' them,” coach Bobby Bowden said of his loss to Miami. “I’ve said it many times, you don’t win games you lose them … You can take this game and go back and say that’s where we lost the game. There were a whole lot of those. The one that hurt the most was when we had a six point lead down on about the 30… and we fumbled.

"Those first game mistakes…we scored a touchdown and what happens, the extra point team runs out on the field. But we’re not going for one, we’re going to go for two and we had to use a timeout. Boy we could have used that timeout!

"The only thing our kids did, and they hadn’t been through this before, was when the extra point team went out on the field. They should have checked with us before they do that. And it cost us a timeout."

MARYLAND

“I think we are all disappointed but this is a very young team and when I looked at the tape, I saw our kids fighting and scrapping,” coach Ralph Friedgen said. “Maybe they did some things wrong here and there but I never saw a lack of effort, so I am going to hang with these guys. I was concerned that something like this could happen but you have to remember that we played a very good team playing very well at its best. We have to grow from that experience and be better than we were last week, and continue to do that each and every week. For me to just get down on our players, I’m not going to do that. I believe in these kids and this is not going to be an overnight thing. When you have as many young players as we do, it’s going to be a learning experience and we just have to keep having faith in them, support them, and hopefully they’ll get better and better as we go along.

“The biggest thing on our offensive line is that we got beat on some twists inside. Going in, I was concerned on how we would match up at our right offensive tackle. We got beat one time and I thought Paul Pinegar played well and when Bruce (Campbell) got hurt we moved him over to left tackle and I thought he hung in there better than I thought he would. I thought R.J. Dill did some good things. He made some mistakes but I saw some promise there and in time he will be fine. We have to get better inside as a whole but there wasn’t anything we didn’t anticipate them doing, they just did it pretty well. It’s all fixable but its just a matter of seeing situations and becoming confident.”

NC STATE

"When we set up the line, we thought we had our best five up there," NC State coach Tom O'Brien said of losing Jake Vermiglio early against South Carolina. "When you have to start shuffling the third series of the game, that doesn’t help you up front. As the game progressed we got into a better rhythm. Guys felt a little more at home in what they were doing. We’ll just continue to work and get better. I think we got the right guys. One of the things that we did well is that we prepared for this game as well as we’ve prepared in my three years here. These kids came to this game with the attitude a football team has to have. They were very business-like, not a lot of horsing around that we saw our first two years here like we were going to a parade instead of a football game. They showed up to play football. If they didn’t it might have ended up the way the game did last year and the way the game started. It hurt a lot. It hurt this team a lot because they put a lot into it. Not to come away with the victory is a tough thing for this football team. It’s a journey, it’s the first step. As long as we get better from here then we’ll be fine."

"I think it’s really premature to sound the death knell on the ACC or anybody in the first week of the season," O'Brien said. "You don’t know. It’s the same way as trying to make a top-25 poll until October, until guys start playing each other. I mean there are so many moving parts in a football team. Some are younger and get better. Some get hurt, whatever it is. You have to put the pieces of the puzzle together. We are still working on pieces to our puzzle."

WAKE FOREST

"I think the toughest thing for us is the change from last week to this week," coach Jim Grobe said of preparing for Baylor and now Stanford. "Last week there were a lot of formations, a lot of different types of plays, options and trick plays and lots of different things to prepare the players for. Mainly basketball-on-grass-type stuff. This is a completely different offense. This is a knock-you down type offense. So our young defenders that haven’t played much football saw a three-ring circus last week and now they are going to get a real tough physical offense coming to town. So that’s going to be our challenge. To change gears and get in the mindset that we better keep our pads down and get our cleats settled in the turf pretty good or we’re going to get knocked off the football. It’s a completely different plan from last week."