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TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY MEDIA CONFERENCEFebruary 4, 2015Eric MorrisTHE MODERATOR: Questions for Coach Morris. Q. Bunch of a wide receivers? COACH MORRIS: Lots of them, right? Six of them. Three of them are really long kids. 6'5", Donta Thomas, 6'4", J. F. Thomas, and Quan Shorts is about 6'2". Big, long kids that can hopefully stretch the field and win these jump ball battles and help us in the red zone. Our efficiency in the red zone was really bad this year. Part of that is because we didn't have that length for kids to go up and get it. We really missed Jace and Eric Ward this year. Hopefully they can be big targets in the end zone and all over the field. Q. With the receivers, a lot of different skill sets. COACH MORRIS: We're down on numbers big‑time. We got six guys on scholarship right now in the receivers room, which is crazy around these parts. We wanted to get six of them. I think we addressed every need. We're going to start off Tony Brown and Quan Shorts at Z. Both of them are big, strong, good route runners. Savvy guys that understand football. Donta Thompson will start off on wide Kind of want to develop him. He's probably 205, 210 pounds, but has the frame to be 230, 240. We'll start inside. Keke Coutee is a guy that can really run. He ran 4.39 and 4.41 for every coach in here. A kid similar to Jakeem but a little bit longer. He's probably 5'10", 5'10" and a half. Still a slight frame right now. Probably 160 pounds. Hopefully get him up to 170, 175.  Can run, stretch the field. Jace can do it all. He's the ultimate deep threat ball. We had him rated as the top receiver in the state of Texas after spring evaluations. He's a guy we're excited about. The wild card in it all, nobody talks about him at all, is maybe my favorite, Jonathan Jones. We have had a lot of success with guys that played quarterback. He was a guy that had multiple offers but were so excited when we offered him. It's been his dream to play receiver. You always want a kid that's as excited to be here as we were to get him. So we're going to start him off at wide, too, see where he develops into. But all that stuff we're going to mix and match. We'll play the best eight receivers, see who the top couple are, probably play two or three of them next year. Q. Start him in H? COACH MORRIS: Yes, we'll start him at H. JF we'll start at X I think he'll be a really good complement to Devin Lauderdale. Devin is a small, fast guy. He's a big, long guy. I think they'll complement each other well at the X position. Two to Z, two a Y, one to H, one to X. With what we do, we got some guys here, Reginald Davis needs to keep coming along. He was up and down last year, had some bright spots, some not so bright spots. He's a kid that's working hard right now. We're going to rely a lot on him. Reginald and Dylan coming back. Devin really came on at the end of the season. We look for really big things. He's learning how to work in the weight room right now. He's improved on the field and off the field. His attitude is totally changed. We have that and then inside we have Ian and Jakeem are the only two proven guys. Cam played sparingly. When you look at it, you have four or five guys that have had significant amount of playing time around here. We're going to throw it and rotate eight to nine guys in, so some of those guys are going to have to step in and play a key role for us. Q. Do you feel you have a couple of guys that can bring the physical mentality? COACH MORRIS: Yeah, no doubt. With them being bigger bodies, when you look at Jonathan Jones is 195 pounds right now. Same thing with Quan Shorts, 192 pounds. Everybody besides Keke is really a physical, dominant presence. A year and summer in the weight room, add a little bulk on him. We'll get away from having some of the smaller body types out there. Hopefully with that length they can control the perimeters a little bit better and our screen game because that's something we have to improve on, too. Q.  (No microphone.) COACH MORRIS: Yeah, I mean, really dynamic player. He's good with the ball in his hands for being that big. He's a basketball player that really excelled his first two years at South Oak Cliff in basketball. His body control and his ball skills are unprecedented for not playing football for that long. Yeah, he's a kid that can step in. A really confident kid that has some swagger, has some toughness about him, really wants the ball in his hand, what you want at the wideout position, especially around here. Q. (No microphone.) COACH MORRIS: Yeah, probably. I'd say probably a little more athletically. He's a little more raw right now, but athletically probably a little bit better than Jarrett. Runs a little bit better, jumps a little bit better. Q. How tough is the not to pick a quarterback in this class? COACH MORRIS: Not that tough. Obviously with how everything happened, not exactly what you wanted. But the fact of the matter is you look at our roster and you feel really good with two guys right now, which is important. Two, this day and age, as you all know, we did research, eight of the last 10 or seven of the last 10 have transferred. It's the new fad in football. That quarterback position, you don't play early, the new age of recruiting with social media, these guys are lifted up on a pedestal, come in as four or five stars, you have to bring them down‑to‑earth after that, it doesn't sit well. Guys are transferring all over the country. You see that. We got depth right now. We have those two guys and the (indiscernible) kid that is a scholarship‑caliber guy that we have here. He's been learning the system. His arm is as good as anybody we have on campus right now. It will be interesting to see if he can process it out there, get through his reads, make good decisions. There's three guys we have right there. That's all we need next year. Those two guys, Davis and Patrick, are still young guys. Need a ton of reps. It will be fun to watch them compete. We have to address some other needs. If you look at it, our biggest needs are on defense, we need depth. This is as good a class as we ever signed here, we needed wideouts. Got six really good ones. Really happy with that. Our runningback is a guy that was recruited by everybody in the nation. Coach Jinks did a phenomenal job of getting guy committed early, building a great relationship, fought off everybody from Michigan to Florida State, Baylor, Texas, A&M. Corey is a guy, fastest 200 in the nation. It will be a lot of fun to watch him hit the hole. Q. (No microphone.) COACH MORRIS: Coach Jinks, I probably trust his evaluation of high school talent better than anybody on our staff because he's been around that state so long. It's funny, we're recruiting another guy from that school. He called me. I was on the road. He said, Hey, look, I know we're looking at this other guy, I'm watching him do sprints now. This kid is better athletically than anybody we have on our team. I start laughing. What does he have going? He said, Nothing. He was so adamant about it, I said, Go ahead, pull the trigger. He did. Started building the relationship. Got him to commit early. The rest is history. I give all that Coach Jinks. Q. (Question regarding quarterbacks.) COACH MORRIS: JF is a great player. He's got a lot of dog in him. I think you can see that on tape. I just think now with those two being all the media, Twitter, Instagram, you get so much notoriety, all that stuff. That part from a PR stage, it kind of hurts you a little bit to have a guy committed so long, something crazy happens. Like we've said since we've been here, we want guys that want to be here and play hard for each other. We're still trying to establish that chemistry in the locker room with a brotherhood of guys in there that will fight for each other day in, day out. That's what we want. We feel like we got a lot of kids today that signed with us that want to be at Texas Tech and they have a lot to prove. A bunch of them stuck with us through a not‑so‑good season, which shows a lot about their character. We couldn't be more happy. A guy like Madison, all the Big 12 made long pushes at towards the end of this thing, thanks but no thanks. Conner Dyer, those are guys that are true Red Raiders, they want to be here. I think they're doing all the right things for this program. That's who we want in these seats during the team meeting. Q. Did you talk up the new facilities? COACH MORRIS: Yeah, absolutely. Especially when they come here on their visit, we do a presentation. They're going to be second to none in the Big 12. It's something we need to get done pretty soon around here. The indoor, I think we're the last one in the Big 12 that don't have an indoor. Yeah, I mean, we couldn't be more excited about what they've come up with, the drawings, the plans. It's going to be a special place when they get it all done. Q. Is that a difference breaker to any of them? COACH MORRIS: Yes and no. I mean, it's good for them to see that. But we certainly don't have the nicest facilities in the Big 12 right now. We're on the way to getting there, though. It will be a huge step in the right direction once we get that built. I think this staff has prided our recruiting on building relationships with kids and parents. Hopefully that's not the deciding factor. It always helps to have nice things and know that their kids are going to be taken care of, the whole nutrition side of it, cost of attendance. Kirby Hocutt has done a phenomenal job of keeping us up with the rest of the conference. Once we get this built, we'll be sitting right there at the top. Q. You mentioned social media. Talk about how key a role that's become in recruiting. COACH MORRIS: My wife could probably answer that question better than me because she gets mad at me because I'm on the couch, here on Twitter. Yeah, it's just different. We can't text message them. Most of the time we can't call them. But I can shoot them a DM. That's the way you communicate with these kids, start building relationships with them. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. I'm on it all the time, more than I should be. Two, it's a good way for us to kind of get a feel for the kid, too. The stuff they're posting on them, we'll get off of kids and stop recruiting them for the things they post on social media. It's really good. In a certain aspect we get a lot of our news from the rivals, scout, 247, we can see who is recruiting who, who is offering who. That's a good part of it. It's just funny for these kids to come in here and to have already been built up to be this great player, then they get here and you start back at the bottom. We said today about 20 minutes ago officially we have started de‑recruiting half these recruits right now, try to bring them back to earth, give them the mindset they have to go to work when they get here. Q. (No microphone.) COACH MORRIS: Twitter is first. Instagram second. Facebook I hardly use at all. It's almost extinct now to us in the recruiting thing, which is funny. I'm not on the Snap Chat. I've heard too many horror stories from Snap Chat. I'm boycotting that one. The two main ones are Twitter and Instagram. Q. (Question regarding early sign date.) COACH MORRIS: I think it saves a lot of people money, time, effort, once these kids do make decisions. Everything you do on an official visit, we're doing now on junior days pretty much. All the important academics, see the facility, watching tape, all that stuff. The kids see on junior days. They're going to them now. It's funny, they come on official visits, when 10 years ago that was a big deal for them to see everything that was going on, their parents will see that. Now we're trying to fill time and voids because they've seen everything we have. Sometimes they've been committed for over a year when they get their official visit. Use the university's resources and money more wisely. We're spending all this money to fly back and forth to Hawaii, to visit these kids, three weeks in a row, which Braden did sign early, which made it nice. We can start working ahead. I think it could save you a lot of the headaches, time and money. Q. Communicate in the same way but a different vehicle? COACH MORRIS: I mean, it's hard for me to say because I was not heavily recruited. But some of these kids I think aren't as appreciative as what all goes into this, them getting the free education, now the cost of attendance going into it, the whole nutrition factor side of it. We're feeding them a couple meals a day, hot snacks all day long. I just don't think they appreciate it as much as what they did 10, 15 years ago. They're going to school for free. What a privilege and what an honor it is. It's almost like all the stuff has kind of gotten to them and they expect all this stuff should be handed to them when they get here. I don't think they appreciate it as much now. Just the whole experience, really the fact there's not many kids that sign Division I to play football. Q. (No microphone.) COACH MORRIS: We do it a little bit different just because it's a little bit harder for us to get 300 kids here. Lubbock, Texas, is a little bit further away from everybody else. Sometimes we feel we get one shot at them. We try to do smaller ones all through spring ball so they can actually experience practice. When we have a day off in between, that's when we'll hit all the academics, tour, let them watch film, they see a practice. We want to keep it smaller groups and selective because we feel if we get 300, we might look over a kid, he's a really good player, on his five‑hour drive back to Dallas, he's so mad he didn't get an offer, that was our one shot to actually get him on campus out here. We approach it in kind of a different way than most. Q. (No microphone.) COACH MORRIS: Yeah, absolutely. We're not done yet. We'll probably still need to take a junior college kid or two next year to probably fill some holes in between classes right there with losing a couple kids the last couple years. But, yeah, we're going to start stockpiling offensive linemen around here more than ever. It's a big part of it. With injuries, kids not panning out, whatnot. We want to have 15 to 18 on scholarship. We'll have about 14 next year, 13 or 14. So next year expect another big class of offensive linemen. Q. Any other positions on offense you're looking to hit big next year? COACH MORRIS: The receiver class won't be quite as big, a little bit more than usual. Probably four. We'll probably hit two runningbacks next class. Try to get a bigger kid. All‑purpose back there. Hit one quarterback. Q. (No microphone.) COACH MORRIS: No doubt. You get to know these kids and you build great relationships with them and their families most of the time. Some of the stuff is hard to swallow. At the same time they're 17‑ to 18‑year‑old kids being influenced by a lot of different people, people in their hometown, their coaches, peers, parents. They're being pulled in a lot of different directions. You're the adult in the situation, handle it the best way you can. You develop great relationships with these kids. It can be tough to swallow at times. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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