Transcript: Bobby Petrino's Virginia preview

Louisville football coach Bobby Petrino met with the media on Monday to review his team's 66-21 win over Murray State and look ahead to Saturday's showdown at Virginia.

Couple things at play this week:

* It's Louisville's first road game of the season, and it's become a tougher one than many of us thought it'd be before the season started.

* UVA's defensive line and pass rush impressed Petrino and helped, in his opinion, lead to the nine takeaways the Cavaliers have had in their first two games.

* Will Gardner is the starting quarterback. Period.

Here's the transcript of Petrino's press conference:

Opening statement: We're excited about being 2-0. The other night's game, I thought we played well offensively and defensively. It's been fun to watch our defense play. When our first defense was in there, they were playing real fast. They were flying to the ball. We're tackling well. They've really done a nice job.

We'll be challenged this week, so it'll be interesting to see how we do defensively. We'll have a more complicated offense to deal with, and certainly some run game and pass game that'll challenge us.

Offensively, we need to continue to get better throwing the ball. I like the way we're running the football. We're running it with some power. We're running it when you have to run the ball. We're still not as explosive throwing the ball down the field that we need to be. We're going to have to make some plays down the field to win the game.

I'm looking forward to see how we travel. It'll be the first time we travel together and make sure it's a business trip and that we're able to stay focused and deal with the crowd noise. It'll be a good challenge on the road against a team I think's playing really well and looks very, very well-coached.

On the offense: We haven't been able to complete some of the deep balls that we've called and thrown down the field. We haven't gotten a lot of yards after the catch yet, where a guy catches a six-yard pass, makes a couple guys miss and goes the distance for a touchdown. We just have to continue to work at it, work at running after the catch and work at being accurate and getting open on the deep ball.

We did get two pass-interence calls on deep balls, which is a good thing, but you'd rather complete them for touchdowns.

On road games: We took a week in camp and worked on as if we were on a road game and how we'd handle it with the crowd. We'll get back it again tomorrow. At least it'll be familiar with our guys and we've covered our bases a little bit, but it'll still be different. It's real important that we stay focused as we travel. Friday is very similar to the way it's been the last two weeks. The better we keep on schedule, the better we'll travel.

On UVA takeaways: A big part of it is the pressure on the quarterback. They really rush the quarterback. They come off the ball hard. They've got two really active defensive ends and two guys inside to push the pocket. Most of their turnovers have come as a result of pressuring the quarterback and either the quarterback fumbling the ball or having to throw under pressure. They've been impressive on defense. They play very fast. They have a very experienced group. When you watch last year's games, most of those guys are in the games from a year ago.

On ball security: Not necessarily more emphasis because that's what we always emphasize. That's how you win and lose games. We have to take care of the ball and we have to force more turnovers.

On freshman QB Reggie Bonnafon: I think we have to wait and see how the week goes. Will Gardner's our starting quarterback. We're very, very comfortable with how Will's developed and how much better he was in Week 2 than in Week 1. It was great to get Reggie in there. I was very impressed with the way he played, the way he handled the huddle, everything that he did. This is a Monday, and the players are off. I'm certainly not going to make any decisions on the playing time there, but there's no question Will Gardner's our starting quarterback.

On Virginia's quarterbacks: They don't a lot of different (things) when the two of them are in the game. They're going to run their offense. They make it difficult on you with their running game and the read zone. They both can execute that. They can both throw the ball. Their offensive coordinator has some Mike Martz in his history, so you see a utilization of the running backs in the passing game and some of the things they did with the Rams when they were really good. It'll challenge our defense to be really on top of formations and motions.

On if he felt he had to reassure Will Gardner that he's the starting QB: No, I haven't seen Will today. This is their day off, but we came back in yesterday and watched all the video and went out and ran. Normally we would practice the young guys and run the guys who played in the game, but they all had so many reps, we ran as a team. Will knows we have a lot of confidence in him. He was playing well. He didn't want to come out of the game.

We felt like we needed to get freshened up for this coming game. When we played the two games back-to-back, close together, I made the decision at halftime offensively that our starters were done. Obviously they would've liked to keep playing and the coaches would've liked to see them keep playing. Defensively, the decision was, they hadn't had as many reps, so we'd have them play one series and then take them out of the game.

On playing so many players vs. Murray State: Friday night, I talked to our team about, 'We should win this game. We're a better football team than they are. We have a lot of guys in this room who contributed to use winning the Miami game by how hard they practiced and the looks they gave us in practice, but they didn't get to play in the game. So what we need to do is go out and take care of business in the first half, play well, get a lead, so we can get everyone in the game and get to play in the stadium.'

On using check-with-coaches before snaps: That's pretty common around the country. A lot of people do that. Sometimes it's live, sometimes it's not live. You mix it up. It's part of the no-huddle system.

On linebacker Keith Kelsey's play: He's steady. Everything he does, from when we first got here. He conducts his business the right way -- on the field, off the field, in the weight room. When they had three weeks off in May, a lot of players were in here lifting. Some were in here more than others. He was in here every day. When I saw him in June, when we hadn't even started our summer program yet, he'd already gained weight and gotten stronger and looked awesome.

He's very, very dedicated. He's just going to continue to get better with more experience.