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BAYLOR UNIVERSITY MEDIA CONFERENCE

September 4, 2007

Guy Morriss

Q. You always hear guys saying they make the biggest improvement from the first to second game.
COACH MORRISS: Yeah, I think that's probably true. I hope it is, because we need to get better between now and Saturday.

Q. How big a jump do you think you need to take?
COACH MORRISS: Well, I think we've got to get a little more focused. We got to play a little faster, I think. I mean, we have to go out and play to win instead of play to not get beat.
I thought we would match up with them speed-wise pretty well. We've got some guys that can really run. We just didn't play fast for the entire game. We played in spurts. Again, we got to be a little more consistent.
You know, obviously that has to start today.

Q. What are some of the problems that Rice presents?
COACH MORRISS: Well, if I was Coach Bailiff, I was a player at Rice, I'm watching us play, I got to believe they feel they can come up here and get after us, number one. That's where it's gonna start.
They probably will feel good about schemes 'cause they're going to line up and play the same defense. I would imagine that Sunday, the game plan is on its way in the mail to David, and they're going to throw some of the same stuff at us that TCU did, see if we can handle it.
Their offenses are pretty similar. So from an overall standpoint, I think they got to feel like they come up here, you know, they turned the ball over five times, had a punt blocked for a safety to get beat.
Knowing David, he's telling them basically the same thing we're gonna tell our guys. We got to hold on to the football, play fast, furious, see what happens kind of. Eliminate the mistakes, all that stuff, the turnovers. They probably feel like they can come up here and win this football game.
So we got to get our kids refocused and go out and play harder, play a little faster, eliminate the turnovers for us to have a chance to win.
I think we're kind of both in the same situation right now. Same message, basically.

Q. Coach said the offense right now is better than it was last year. Not being able to execute getting into the end zone, what kind of extra push is it going to take to get over that?
COACH MORRISS: I think we probably are based on what we've seen during camp. I mean, you know, in practices, so forth, like that. I think we feel like we got maybe a few more play-makers, depth-wise, those type of things.
You got to take that to the game field. You know, we had two opportunities to score. We didn't get that done. The last play of the half is a great example. We got to where X and Z are running corner routes. They're in cover two. They're pulling those safeties off. Y is running right down the middle. We get the ball completed. 27-yard gain.
But if you go back and look, if Y is on a dead sprint, you know, splitting the hashes, splitting those safeties, catch it on the fly, he'll knock his head on the goalpost. You know, I mean, those are the things that we got to keep emphasizing to the kids. They've seen it now on tape.
We had a very good meeting Sunday. They understand, I think, some of these things. You know, just go do what you're asked to do, do your job, do it wide open, and that's going to cure a lot of ills.

Q. How much of that is attributed to maybe inexperience?
COACH MORRISS: I don't know. You're making your first start. I don't know. Whether you're young or old, when the play calls for you to go full speed down the middle of the seam, that, to me, seems like a pretty easy assignment. I don't know. Maybe I'm somewhere else. I don't understand that.
That's the frustrating part about things for me is we've got to do a better job of listening to our coaches and executing the way it's coached to be done. Maybe some of that is attributed to youth, I don't know. You know, I don't know. I don't know about that.

Q. Staying with youth, the punting, are you going to take another look at that?
COACH MORRISS: I think we're happy with our punter. We've seen him punt better and hang it longer. I know he's capable of doing it. Shea, we're going to have to take a look at that situation. Like I said, I think we'll have a little kickoff this week, see what happens.
Got to get the ball through the posts when you're at the 11, 9. I don't know, those are too close to be missing like we did.

Q. Are you just as confident as y'all were heading up to Fort Worth?
COACH MORRISS: Are we confident?

Q. Yes.
COACH MORRISS: I don't know. You'll have to ask these guys. I think so. You know, I mean, I know the boat's unloading pretty fast right now. I understand that. I don't think any of our kids are doubters yet.

Q. (No microphone.)
COACH MORRISS: It is a concern. He's our best offensive lineman to this point. It is what it is, so we're going to take what we got left, rep him, try to make him better. We just have to go down the road with what we got.

Q. Dan in that spot, is he pretty capable?
COACH MORRISS: Yeah, we've been repping him there a couple weeks now for a disaster plan. We got some guys that can swing in and out, you know, flip sides and so forth.
We experimented with some of that this week, see if we can't come up with the best five guys that we think can help us beat Rice.

Q. Is the most frustrating part of Saturday's game that you feel like you got play-makers, but...
COACH MORRISS: Like I say, it's frustrating to me that we didn't play wide open. I know we were capable of playing a lot better than that. That's the frustrating part for me.

Q. Why do you feel like the players were tight?
COACH MORRISS: I'm not sure. I don't see there's any reason to be tight. We talk about staying loose but focused, have fun. That's what the game's all about, you know.
I didn't sense that we were uptight going up there, but we certainly played uptight. Played too tight.

Q. Is it harder to get the offense to play like that in a wide-open deal? Usually you hear about defenses playing wide open, flying around. Harder to get offenses to do that?
COACH MORRISS: I don't think it should be. You know your assignment. You do it full speed, wide open. What's so hard about that?

Q. Do you think they just don't know maybe the system as well as they should to do it wide open?
COACH MORRISS: No. Unless I'm wrong, we've got two years invested in this system now. It's not that complex. I'm not using that for an excuse, no.

Q. The fact that Rice runs the same defense, they've seen your offense now --
COACH MORRISS: We practice against it every day. The four-two-five, nothing mystical about it for our kids. Like you say, we run it. TCU runs it. It's about people as far as I'm concerned.

Q. Can you talk about the senior leadership on defense.
COACH MORRISS: They're both senior guys. They've been through quite a bit here at Baylor. It's been good for our underclassmen. Alton is kind of quiet. He doesn't say boo to anybody. He's just quiet by nature. But he's a leader by example.
Josh is a little bit different. Josh will get in your face a little bit. He's kind of vocal. Both of them are kind of confident kids. Both of them played well the other night, by the way.
I think they've got their teammates' respect.

Q. How would you rate Blake's performance?
COACH MORRISS: How do I rate it?

Q. Yes.
COACH MORRISS: It's kind of like Lee said, he's made some mistakes. He knows what his mistakes were. You know, the thing is, it kind of says a lot about Blake. The first thing out of his mouth was he took the blame for the whole show.
You know, that's not the case. That kind of speaks to his character. You know, he played okay. We got to get the people around him playing better, and he's got to step his game up, as well.
Physically I think he's very capable. For the most part he made good reads, good checks. Couple decisions I think he would like to have to do over. You know, everybody took their turn, so that's kind of where we are with everybody right now.

Q. Talk about kind of bouncing back from that first game.
COACH MORRISS: I haven't seen him since Sunday. Sunday wasn't too comfortable for him, to be honest with you. It was a good meeting. But I think they'll be fine. They're pretty resilient. Like I say, they're not jumping off the ship just yet.
But we're going to have another meeting here shortly. We'll find out exactly where they are. We'll see. We got to regroup, got to practice better, got to take all that practice to the field this week.
Hopefully, like I say, to me, if we would have went down swinging with the empty gun, I would have been okay with that. I mean, I want to win. I didn't feel like we did that. You know, we just weren't playing at a redline-type speed. You know what I'm saying? That's what's frustrating for me.

Q. Was that a big part of Sunday's discussion?
COACH MORRISS: It was. It was.

Q. Was that uncomfortable?
COACH MORRISS: It was very uncomfortable. I mean, that's not good enough. That's not going to get us where we want to go, so it's got to get fixed, it's got to get better. And they understand that. You know, they know it.
Anything else? Thank you, all right.

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