BK: Yeah, and then we’re gonna take the red shirt off of Jay Hayes. Jay Hayes is gonna play. He’ll be part of the rotation as well as (Jacob) Matuska. He’ll play as well.

Q: That had to be an interesting conversation with Hayes?

BK: It was a difficult decision for me to make, yeah. We’re gonna play him a minimum of 30 plays. We’ll up him to about 40. We’ll get 10 days to two weeks of practices. We want to get him to 100 reps. I feel if we get him to 100 reps. Kolin Hill’s got 94. (Grant) Blankenship’s got 103. (Daniel) Cage has got 113 this year in totality. If we can get him up to 100 reps and a couple weeks of practice, we’ll feel as though we did by him the right thing to get him enough reps and enough work to make it worthwhile. We brought him up on Tuesday and he made an impact. We’re a better football team by playing him. He’ll play the three (technique). He’ll play inside.

Q: Talk more about Jay Hayes.

BK: He is physically able to compete with our first five guys on the offensive line. He can physically go in there toe to toe and has the strength to go with them on a play-by-play basis. Already has the physical ability to do that. Where we lost him a little bit early on was he just got a little lost in terms of packages. He wasn’t in our first and second down packages. He was in a sub package evaluation, in that sub package evaluation we looked more toward edge rusher types. Now with the need for more inside guys, he certainly showed himself that he can come in and help us and upgrade what we have currently.

Q: Did you ever get close with Jonathan Bonner of Jhonny Williams?

BK: No. Those guys were not. The only guy that has only been … Jay Hayes has been ready every week, we were hoping not to play him. And it was a difficult decision. I’ve had to weigh a lot of factors. A lot of factors from my standpoint. Historically, we think Jay Hayes can play at the next level. We think he’s that good of a player. We haven’t had a lot of NFL defensive linemen hang around here for five years. There’s a lot of factors that went into this evaluation of do we play him? The key for me in playing him is to get him to 100 reps. If we were going to play him five reps, six reps, seven reps, I’m not playing him. He’s gonna play a lot. That’s why I feel like to get him three games against what we feel like are going to be three very good opponents plus a mini spring ball, now he can go compete with (Andrew) Trumbetti, Blankenship, those guys that already have some defense under their belt and he can go beat them out and compete with them.

Q: I’m guessing he’d pretty excited about it. You’re the one that has to balance now against the future.

BK: Your first response is, ‘Yeah, I’m ready to go.’ Then I’m sure he went back to the dorms and somebody talked to him and said, ‘You crazy? They’re gonna pull your red shirt off with two games to go?’ That’s generally how that goes. I don’t know if that happened or not, but generally what I do, I get them to practice the first day and the first thing I want to hear from is my defensive coaches and say, ‘What do you think? Can he impact the game? Can he make us a better football team? Can he help us win?’ And if I get an affirmative on that, then I gotta make a decision. So then I sat down with him, I said, ‘What do you think?’ Can you wrap your arms around this decision? He was all in. So I went with it. It was not an easy decision. These ones that are that late in the season are never easy ones.