Posted by ESPN.com's Heather Dinich

DUKE

“I’m still very sure of our team,” coach David Cutcliffe said after a loss to FCS Richmond. “What I said is that this team has capabilities to be a bowl team, and it should be a bowl team. There’s no ifs, ands or buts about it, the mountain gets a little higher when you lose. Now we’ve got to turn around and go win seven games, and that’s a nice challenge. But you’ve got to love challenges, and you’ve got to love the opportunity we have. The key to all of this is that you can talk yourself out of a lot of things if you do anything other than take it one game at a time. Right now, I’m totally convinced that our team will respond and go play the best it can play Saturday at Army. That’s what I want to see.”

GEORGIA TECH

“Everybody talks about how our quarterbacks get beat up all the time,” coach Paul Johnson said. “Josh Nesbitt probably did not get tackled the last two and a half weeks of camp. That is a concern some times (that he did not get hit). He got hit up high some but when you do not get tackled there is no excuse for it but that is the concern. It is probably not a surprise that the two guys that laid the ball on the ground were the two guys that were not getting hit in fall camp.

“I do not think you have to fumble. We have played games where we have not fumbled. It is not that hard to tuck the ball and squeeze it. If you look at the fumbles, one he [Josh Nesbitt] had the ball by his knee and the other one is just having enough urgency to take care of it. No matter what offense you run, occasionally somebody is going to knock one out. Those were careless; Tevin [Washington] was careless with his as well.”

MIAMI

The Hurricanes have a bye week before facing Georgia Tech next week, and did not have their weekly press conference, but coach Randy Shannon spoke on Wednesday's ACC teleconference.

"It's a big benefit because you get the opportunity to practice more than two to three days on an offense that's unusual to most teams you face throughout the country, a typical run-zone type of scheme, a power game with play action off throwing the football, but this is a threat of a fullback running the ball, the quarterback running the ball, and the option outside," Shannon said. "You have to be sound, and players have to understand what you're trying to get done on defense to prevent big plays from happening."

"You never really get a scout team - in all my years of facing the option, and even when I was a player, it takes about one quarter to really get caught up because the speed of the linemen coming off the football, the quarterback doing a great job, it's hard to simulate the speed, but you can get an idea."

NORTH CAROLINA

"You’ve just got to be positive and tell them to focus on the little things," coach Butch Davis said of the receivers dropping balls at practice. "It’s like somebody that’s missing three-foot putts – you don’t just want to stand there and say, ‘Well, make it’ and just starting screaming at the guy. You want to talk about guys getting the yips. It’s, ‘Hey, you want to focus on the X of the ball… You want to see the X come into your hands. You want to see the ball and tuck it away and secure it.’ And a little bit of it is the relaxation part of it."

VIRGINIA

"Do you want a calendar date on that?" -- coach Al Groh, when asked about his timetable for picking one of his three quarterbacks.

"Clearly when one of them shows that he is by far the best option, with the two quarterbacks, who as I mentioned earlier, Vic and Jameel, have amongst their skills the ability to run with the ball. For those teams that have that kind of player, TCU has one of those players. Their quarterback was, I think, the third leading rusher on the team last year. And so when a team -- you will see a number of similarities in the two teams’ offensive styles. TCU is primarily, more than any other personnel group, they have four wide receivers in the game. They will be in the shotgun almost all the time and sometimes those four wide receivers will turn into five receivers when they go empty. Teams that have the quarterback who has the capacity to run the ball as their quarterback clearly does and as two of our quarterbacks do, the defense does not spread out to match the five wide receivers, then there's an open player. So the defense, whoever you are, whatever your defensive system is, that spreads the defenses out.

And when the quarterback is capable of being a runner as well as a passer, he nearly becomes like the 12th man on offense. So the team has five wide receivers out, and six offensive linemen, and then still have a runner in the backfield, that adds up to 12. And so they do very well with that. That's one of the significant issues that they are going to have to deal with on defense. Fortunately we had 35 or some-odd practices of dealing with that with our team. When you have that type of quarterback, it's a comforting thing to know that you have two of them and that you're able to utilize one more than you otherwise would if it weren't for somebody else who could come in and do the same thing. With these two players here, in order to be able to exploit the skills of one, it's really necessary to get the other one equally ready. Otherwise, if one of them is banged up or unable to go, then the whole system changes. But with two of them we have a great facility to do that. In the case of those two players, I think that will certainly be the case for some time."

VIRGINIA TECH

"Well we just have to be who we are," coach Frank Beamer said when asked about the delicate balance between asking Tyrod Taylor to run and keeping him healthy. "Do some things and execute. We had some good plays we were close, as I said earlier, there were about five plays that were very close to being long plays. We had a couple long plays, we just needed a few more, against a defense like that it is tough to grind it out over a lot of distance. You need some long plays in there. We were close, we just didn't quite get them. The effort was there and we just need to continue to get better and get the young tailbacks going. I think they gave use hope. Oglesby did a good job when he was in there and they need to keep on developing."

BONUS: Jacksonville State coach Jack Crowe, whose team played Georgia Tech last week and has FSU this weekend:

“Watching ESPN they flash up this scroll of the top 25 schedule and I think we are the only team that is on the scroll two straight weeks by the teams in top 25,” Crowe said. “I would say we are in a unique position going from one to the next. What you have in Georgia Tech is about as powerful offensive team that led the ACC in offense last year, but right behind them is Florida State. Florida State is on the other end of the spectrum, which its all about speed and skill players. We are going to have to make a tremendous adjustment to play those different styles of offenses back-to-back and the offenses of that quality. Ryan (Perrilloux) being back this week really gives us a chance to maybe get to the style of play that we have been planning and working on."