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TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

September 28, 2015

Eric Morris

Lubbock, Texas

Q. Coach, going back on the TCU game, how do you think your offense did?
COACH MORRIS: Decent. You know, we scored some points but squandered some opportunities for sure. Probably guys up front in the run game did a good job. Didn't hold up as good as I would have liked a couple times on pass protection. They got to Pat a couple times, got some pressure on him and got him hit quite a few times. But did a great job. De-Andre played like a possessed man out there, it's good to see. He stepped up, he was a leader for us in the huddle and he did a good job. But we had a couple opportunities to put it away and we didn't, we came up a little short.

Q. Kliff was saying that Pat is day to day. Was he exceptionally sore on Sunday?
COACH MORRIS: Yeah, I haven't talked to him yet about it, so we'll see how he progresses. We've got two really good quarterbacks, so not extremely worried about it.

Q. Did (inaudible) emergence in the offense game playing kind of come about by what TCU was showing you defensively or did it also have to do with Pat being hampered a little bit by that leg?
COACH MORRIS: No, it was something we saw on their defense, but then he started running, breaking some tackles, so we just kept feeding him. When a guy gets hot like that and is calling for the ball, it's the first time since we've been here we had a guy on the sideline that legitimately you could see it in his eyes and he was telling us he wanted the football. He's old enough that we rode with him and he didn't prove himself wrong. He did a great job and we blocked well up front and on the perimeter to spring him a couple times. So yeah, it does nothing but open up things down the field for us if we can get a running game going like that.

Q. (No microphone.)
COACH MORRIS: Yeah, but too, just consistency's going to have to keep showing up. I mean, it has the first three games, but then there's a couple drives there where we had some big drops again that cost us. Those are things, especially against a team like TCU that has an offense like that, you can't waste any opportunities to keep those sticks moving, chains going. So they did some good stuff, we'll point that out today, but there's tons of opportunities they had that we could have had even more yards, more productivity from all of them. So yeah, they're definitely going to see some good and some bad.

Q. How impressed were you with Mahomes' effort when he got hit early on to keep on fighting throughout the game?
COACH MORRIS: Yeah, he's definitely a gamer. He's a kid that's extremely tough and I'm glad he's on our team. He's a guy that didn't show as hurt, and after that he fought for a couple first downs and got them for us, and when he had people around him that run on the goal line where he broke two tackles and got us the first down there in the second half was huge in my opinion. So thought our goal line stuff was really good. We really did a good job up front of pounding the ball and getting some movement up front. De-Andre was running strong and Pat made some good reads in the zone read, so that just adds to the gap, like we've talked about, and makes them think about it a little bit more.

Q. (No microphone.)
COACH MORRIS: Yeah, Zach Austin, and then we'll personnel some stuff and move some people around this week and get some people -- get our best four out there in some positions to move inside and outside. So you'll see a little bit of moving around. But I didn't think Giles played very well. It was a big moment for him to have to kind of step in right then and his eyes were pretty big and there's definitely, as a true freshman, we expected that. He's got to continue to get better, but you'll see Zach Austin there with him this week.

Q. Is there any chance Batson could be moved?
COACH MORRIS: No, we're going to keep him and Jakeem over there. I need to keep Jakeem's reps down a little bit. If he plays over 60 reps, he goes down a little bit in the way his game comes out, the way he's graded out, so I want to keep them rotated over there. We have plenty of guys over there that can step up and make plays.

Q. What you do you see when you look at the Baylor defense?
COACH MORRIS: Yeah, they're really good up front, that's what's going to be challenging for us. Oakman and Billings are as good as anybody we'll play this year. Billings stands out more than anybody on tape that I've watched this whole entire year. He's a kid that we have to know where he's at at all times and account for him. His effort's unbelievable and he's really strong. Oakman off the edge, he's a guy that also we have to know where they're at. The back end, I think their corners are playing better this year and their safeties are doing a good job, too. They've got the linebacker back, Young, that was banged up and he's just as productive as any linebacker in the league. So we definitely have it cut out for us. We've got to play well and execute and not turn the ball over.

Q. Coach, do you think if you have to go to Webb on Saturday that it's been good that the competition between him and Mahomes throughout the springs, throughout the fall, do you think that will benefit getting ready if he possibly had to start this game?
COACH MORRIS: Yeah, he's ready. He's done an incredible job coming in extra every single week and preparing like he did when he was a starter, so been proud of him in that regard. He hasn't slouched off and not put the time in. He's in there putting hours in, breaking down film, knows where to go with the ball, been around this offense for a long time, so yeah, we wouldn't blink an eye.

Q. How surprising was it to you that in a game where both teams ran as many plays that they did that there wasn't a turnover in the game?
COACH MORRIS: Yeah, pretty impressive by both sides. Impressive by TCU running a hundred plays with no turnovers and us as well. But we count the safety as a turnover, so I don't think we were as clean as they were. That's something that can't happen, especially at that point in the game, a big game like that. So that was our one big mistake on offense, I thought, and allowed them to get the ball back and a couple points on the board, which could have been huge at the end of that game. But there's not one thing that you can point to. There's about 15 to 20 things that could have made that game go the other way. So I thought the defense did a great job of getting us the ball back quite a few times. So we had opportunities and just didn't get it done. When we got it back there at the end, we still -- we had two runs called that we still like on tape and had been good for us all day and so wouldn't take that back the way we handled it, either. Just got to capitalize on those opportunities.

Q. (Question about Jakeem.)
COACH MORRIS: Up and down, similar to last year. Some really explosive, really good things, and then some things that killed us. He had three drops and that's something that he hasn't done this year, so something that he's got to clean up and we can't go back to where we were last year with him where he's really high and really low. He's got to be more consistent and we're going to find ways to get him the ball and he can't drop it like that.

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