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BCS NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP GAME MEDIA CONFERENCE

December 6, 2009

Jim Tressel

GINA CHAPPIN: I'd like to welcome members of the media. Before we get started, unfortunately Coach Kelly will not be joining us on the call. We're having some difficulties getting him on line. If he happens to join, we will certainly alert you, but we do have Coach Tressel on the line. On behalf of the Tournament of Roses we'd like to welcome you to the Rose Bowl game presented by Citi BCS conference call. We will introduce Coach Tressel, have him make an opening statement, and turn it over for questions.
At this time I'd like to introduce acting president of the Tournament of Roses Jeff Throop for some brief remarks.
JEFF THROOP: Thank you, Gina, and welcome, ladies and gentlemen of the press. It is certainly a pleasure to be with you tonight. On behalf of the Tournament of Roses, we are delighted to welcome the Ohio State Buckeyes and the Oregon Ducks to the 96th Rose Bowl game presented by Citi. We are looking forward to a thrilling New Year's Day game and wish both Coach Tressel and Coach Kelly the very best in their preparation and planning for their trip to Pasadena. Thank you, and congratulations once again.
GINA CHAPPIN: At this time I'd like to introduce the head coach for the Ohio State University Buckeyes, Jim Tressel. Welcome, and thank you.
COACH TRESSEL: Thank you, Gina and Jeff. On behalf of all of the Ohio State Buckeyes, we first want to congratulate Oregon and their great football team and their outstanding coaching staff for that Pac-10 Championship, and it's going to be a tremendous honor to compete in the granddaddy of them all in the 96th Rose Bowl. I know our kids and fans and coaching staff and administration and all of the above are extremely excited to head to Pasadena. It's always one of the goals at the beginning of every football year is that you have a chance to play in that one. You can be assured you've had a wonderful season.
Our staff has been here for nine years, and we haven't had this honor up until this point, and we're looking forward to it, I can promise you that. We're getting ready to play against a great football team in Oregon, and our kids are entering final exams tomorrow morning, and we'll be focused on that for the next four days, and then we'll have a chance to get to work and have our preparations. We'll work here in Columbus until about the 21st of December, and then our guys will have a chance to go home and spend some holiday time with their families, and then we look forward to landing in Los Angeles and heading to our home site there at the Hyatt Century Plaza and preparing for the tremendous festivities that are in and around the Rose Bowl. Our band, I know, is so excited about being a part of that Rose Bowl parade. I think it's amazing just to see their faces light up and know that they'll get a chance to march in that extraordinary event. Everyone here is just extremely excited.
GINA CHAPPIN: Great, Coach, thank you. We will now open it up for questions.

Q. Does Oregon remind you of anyone you guys played this year or any teams that you would have played recently?
COACH TRESSEL: You know, it's difficult for me to say that at this point in time. Obviously we didn't know for sure who we were going to play until late into the evening after having a chance to watch the Civil War and see that extraordinary football game. You know, they play with such tremendous tempo and passion, and I know one thing, we'd better get in shape because they come after it and go hard. There have been times when I think back to Illinois with their fast-paced offense and tremendous run game along with their great passing game, a year ago I know in the Fiesta Bowl as we faced Texas who spread it out and had fast tempo and just did a great job from an offensive standpoint, and defensively they come after you. They're an aggressive style football team. You can see they love to play the game.
It all gets tied together with their great skill and great talent and special teams prowess there. But we're probably not far enough into our preparation. This weekend we did get a practice session in or two, but it really wasn't honed in on exactly what we might be facing with the Ducks. And then of course we had our football banquet today and we're on to finals. Our coaches will be spending a little bit of time here early in the week on the recruiting trail, and then we'll have a chance to watch all of their films and get a handle on it. But I can promise you, they are lightning, and if you can win the Pac-10, I think top to bottom, the Pac-10 is one of the most balanced and good football conferences in America. And if you can win that outright, you have a great football team. We will obviously need to be at our best.

Q. Is it too early to break down how they run the ball and how you might defend that because obviously your rush defense and their rush offense are both very highly regarded?
COACH TRESSEL: Well, the thing that you know that they bring to the table is that at every level and every stage, you've got to defend it all. You've got to defend the running backs who have been extraordinary. The quarterback is a guy who can hurt you bad with his speed and his arm. The receivers do a great job on the quick throws; they do a great job on the deep throws. I think, and we've always felt offensively, if your quarterback adds the dimension of being able to add something with his feet, and their young man, he's scary, they bring everything at you you can possibly get ready for, and they do it at such a fast pace.
I noticed one of the statistics was they don't have an extremely large time of possession, and that's because they score so fast. So we're going to have to be in tremendous shape. We're going to have to have everything covered all the way from the dive to the quarterback to the play action pass to the drop back pass, and the quickness of his release is -- I can tell by watching TV is extraordinary. So it's going to be a great challenge, and our defense I know has done a good job all year, and I know they'll prepare hard.

Q. More than a month will have passed between your last game against Michigan and this one. A lot has been made of that in the past. Is it a concern that you have more than a month off between competitive games?
COACH TRESSEL: You know, it really isn't, because if you think back to when you play your final game of a season and then you play your opener, you have, what, nine months or something like that. Hopefully you work hard to get better at your fundamentals and you improve from one year to the next. Well, we don't have quite that length of time, 40 days or whatever it happens to be, and it gives you an opportunity to heal a little bit. We went 12 straight weekends in a very physical, competitive league, so hopefully we'll be as healthy as ever.
We'll have a significant amount of time to try to get a feel and an understanding for what Oregon brings to the table. And when you get out there in the game, maybe in that first little bit, the speed of the game, you haven't played it at top end for a month or so, but once you get into the flow of the game, it's going to be dependent upon what you do as the game progresses. So no, that really has never been a concern of ours.

Q. As you watched all the games starting with the Civil War and so many great college games over the weekend, was there a part of you that wouldn't have minded being a part of this weekend in the form of a Conference Championship game?
COACH TRESSEL: Oh, I think that that's a positive thing, you know, to play in that, if that's the format you know you're going to be in going into the year and you build toward that and so forth. But you take the Oregon-Oregon State game, that was a Conference Championship game, but it just happened to be the last game played in the regular season. It looked like a Conference Championship game. It was as exciting as any one of them could possibly have been.
There may be a day where the Big Ten has a Conference Championship game, there may be a day that the Pac-10 does. But I think you focus in at the beginning of the year as to what are the challenges and what's the schedule look like, and then you work every day to try to get better. If you've positioned yourself at the end of the year to have a chance to be playing for the championship on the last day, then in essence that is the championship game.

Q. You mentioned the speed and tempo of Oregon, how you guys need to be in shape to defend them. Do you go so far as to change your practice? I mean, do you add conditioning in preparation for this?
COACH TRESSEL: You know, I think the thing that you need to do is always have a certain amount of conditioning in everything you do, but really the key to your conditioning is playing the game and trying to emulate in practice the tempo with which they're going to come at you and the speed at which they're going to hit you. They have speed everywhere, all the way from their people up front to the people outside and the running backs and quarterback and so forth. But I think it's more of just constant repetition and having a feel for things and trying to get to know and be able to anticipate a little bit and really have the understanding that once that play ends, the next play is coming at you in five or six seconds, so you'd better get lined up.

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