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TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY MEDIA CONFERENCE

November 27, 2010

Tommy Tuberville

HOUSTON Â– 20
TEXAS TECH - 35

COACH TUBERVILLE: All right. Well, that was a fun game. I'll tell you, I'm real proud, as I just told the players, I'm real proud of them.
We could have folded our tent about mid-season. It didn't look very good, but I was real proud of how they practiced and how they played, the ups and downs of the year.
And today was the same. We came in, and we knew that we were going to struggle on defense because the team that plays like they play, with the speed that they have, you know, we were going to have to control the ball and make big plays on offense.
And we did just that. You look at the stats and didn't look at the score, you'd say the other team won the game. But coaches have done a very good job of managing the game and how we do things. And taking advantage of the strengths that we have and try to minimize the shortcomings. But it was a good day.
I thought Taylor really played well. The two fumbles really hurt us. I thought we could get to at least 40 points. But we just couldn't hold onto the ball. And we fumbled the ball again down on the goal line, which is perplexing.
But it was a good day defensively. I know that they did get 586 yards. And that's a lot of yards. But when you hold them to 20 points and you do those things, you get a couple of turnovers, big turnovers, it really turns the game around.
It's been a long 11 months. I've been here about 11 months. But these players have made it easier on us, as coaches. Because they've worked hard. And they've accepted us, and the fans have accepted us. So it was a great ending to a season, regular season, here tonight, and we had a lot of brave fans come out in the cool weather. So I want to thank them for that. But it was a good effort on both sides. Houston came in. I know they've been beat up a little bit with quarterbacks. But they've got a very good offense and their defense was even a little better than what we thought after we looked at them on film. But they played with a lot of pride. So it was a good game.
It was good. We would have liked eight or nine, 10 games, but we won seven. Didn't look like we was going to win seven about five weeks ago but after the Missouri game we looked like we picked it up pretty good. And it's about the players coming back each week and practicing hard and playing hard and trying to get better.
Questions?

Q. How do you feel these last two wins against non-conference teams have prepared the team heading into Bowl season?
COACH TUBERVILLE: It's helped us, obviously. We've had some success, got some confidence. I would have rather had them earlier in the season and got that confidence a little bit earlier during the year.
But we couldn't do anything about that. But we took advantage of our non-conference games and we won three conference games. And there's a lot of teams that would love to have seven wins right now.
We're excited about having a chance to go to a Bowl game. We would've loved to win all of them this year, but we could tell, even tonight, against the team we played against tonight, we're just not good enough yet. But we will get here because the seniors that played this year that got us over the hump, got us to a Bowl game, to practice a little more, and recruiting is going great, and they're going to be a big reason for us having the success in the future that we're going to have.

Q. Can you talk about just kind of the key plays the defense made particularly near the red zone, coming up with those interceptions and stopping them and holding them to three points several times?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Yeah, they had us off balance. And they did a good job of running it a little bit more than they normally do. And did some play action passes. They completed a couple of fourth down plays but we had a couple of big fourth down plays they didn't make, especially right at the end.
So you have to step up and make plays. We make it hard. We've got them down inside the five-yard line with three minutes to go, and they go 60 yards in about 45 seconds.
And just shows you that there's some places that we need to fix. But right now we are fighting just to get them out on four downs and it worked tonight in a couple of situations.

Q. How important have the seniors been for you this entire season during the transition and everything?
COACH TUBERVILLE: For a head coach, you're only as good as your seniors the first year. And this is my third time. And from the first day that I came in and we sat down and talked, just as a group of seniors, not the whole team. You know, you could just tell, hey, they wanted to win. They wanted to win games.
And a couple of them came in, visited with me said: Coach, we're going to try to make it easy but it's going to be hard because there's some places we feel like we've got to get better. And they helped me with that.
So it's a good group of guys. When you've got two senior quarterbacks, it makes it tough, too. I've had a heavy heart all year long for Steven Sheffield, not getting him in the game more than what we did. But he's just the epitome of what you think of a Texas Tech football player: Nonselfish, loves to play, loves to play for Tech and he never complained.
And I'm sure there's times when he wanted to. But it was -- it just showed how mature he is and how good a person he is.

Q. Talk about getting to seven wins. Could you talk about how much more attractive a 7-5 team might look as opposed to a 6-6 team coming to Bowls?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, our goal was to get to six after about five games, because of the way it looked. But 7-5/6-6, it doesn't really make any difference I don't think for whatever Bowl we're going to go to.
But I think the 7-5 is more for the seniors than anybody and how we played and how we finished up winning the last two games, a lot of confidence. I think that's the big thing about 7-5. All these other players on the team are going to win a lot of games down the road. These seniors, it was their last year.
So hopefully we can go to a Bowl game and play well and get to 8, and I think about mid-season we would have thought that would have been almost impossible to do, but these guys fought hard to get to that point.

Q. When you look back at Taylor Potts, and although you just have seen him for one year, and he goes over 3,000 yards for the season, sort of makes you think was he underrated as a quarterback, in your opinion, because I think he's been pretty decent?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Quarterbacks, especially starting quarterbacks, in anything you do, whether you throw for 400 or 200, they always get the criticism, especially when you don't win games.
And I can look back and I thought that there was -- I was thinking about it this afternoon sitting around the hotel, 12 games that we played, he probably had two games he'd love to have back. The rest of them he was pretty good.
He threw the ball well and made good decisions. The thing about quarterbacks, you just run the game. You're able to get out and control the tempo and in then third down conversions, I think halftime we were close to 50 or 60 percent third down conversions.
That's how we won this game tonight. We weren't explosive, but we kept the ball moving. We made long drives. And when we got to the red zone, we pretty much capitalized on it. That's because of a quarterback making good decisions.

Q. Detron Lewis had an exceptional night tonight. Did you see anything on film against Houston that would help you exploit that situation?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, Detron is a guy we try to get short passes to because he's so physical. After he catches a ball, he runs with a lot of authority.
The thing that happened with Detron, we started getting a lot of double coverage on the outside on the left side with Lyle Leong. When we started getting that, we felt we needed to get the ball to Detron more. We took him from the slot and moved him to the outside. He got a lot more one-on-one coverage.
That helped him and that helped us as a team. So it was good to get him the ball tonight. There's been a lot of times when he would have liked to have caught more balls, but he's been a big play guy. He's made a lot of plays and caught a lot of touchdown passes and a lot of yards after the catch. And that's what made him pretty special this year.

Q. Did the team -- was there any pressure off the team tonight because they were coming into this Bowl-eligible, do you think?
COACH TUBERVILLE: I would probably say we were a little bit more relaxed knowing that we had a chance to play another game already. Obviously that was because after the last few days there were some teams that didn't get Bowl-eligible. And that put us in a situation where we're not really going to have to worry about it.
But I thought Houston, they played well with all the pressure on them. They needed to win tonight to get to a Bowl. But they played hard. They played well. They came out to win. They went out for a lot of fourth downs and took some chances.

Q. How special has it been to watch Potts and Leong, their rapport together, and obviously the production together on the field?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Potts and all the receivers. I've really enjoyed watching -- not being around a team that's thrown it as much as what we have here -- a few years when I was at the University of Miami, we had some quarterback/receiver combinations. Go back and look at all the receivers we had at Miami. Michael Irvin being one. Testaverde.
But I've really had a fun time this year, even in practice, watching these guys throw and catch, the long passes, the jump balls at the goal line, when we throw it up in the corner. It's almost impossible to defend.
And they've worked hours on it. So it's not by chance that we've made a lot of those plays this year. Lyle on one side and obviously Detron on the other. You've got to have a lot of confidence in doing it. And Coach Brown calling it and executing it.
We've made a lot more of those work than have not worked. But it's been good to watch Lyle and Potts work, being two guys from the same high school and finishing up here and having a great night. I think Lyle made that look like an acrobatic catch on that touchdown. He could have made it look a little bit easier for Potts, but he told him, when he came to the sideline, I made it look hard so you can remember that last touchdown you threw me here in this stadium.
But it's been great to be around these guys, the attitude they have, and how hard they work together and how much time they put in away from the coaches in terms of throwing and catching the ball.

Q. Could you talk about Donnie Carona's performance tonight punting?
COACH TUBERVILLE: He did a good job. The thing about him, after LaCour had a couple of punts that kind of fluttered, he hasn't been able to turn the ball over. We've been working Donnie a lot. And he's been very good into the wind.
And so I thought it was unbelievable how he punted the ball inside the 5 twice. Had a 48-yarder that hung up that they didn't return. I thought he was a big part of the night.
Their special teams, probably the best we've seen all year long. The guy that coaches special teams for Houston, Tony Levine, worked for me at Auburn. I knew he'd fake a punt, do something crazy, just to show me he could do it. Luckily we were able to stop it.
But we wanted to kick away from their returners. And we did a pretty good job where they didn't get a chance or have a chance to get big returns on us, like they have most of the teams they played all year.

Q. What do you do with just a few weeks to address the turnover situation that you guys have?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, I thought it was Baron that fumbled in the end zone, but it wasn't? Right? It was Eric Stephens. And Cornelius fumbled the one that probably could have put the ball game away about 10 or 11 minutes to go in the fourth quarter.
So those things happen. And the more you talk about them, the more you have them. So what we do every day is we just work on fundamentals of holding the ball, protecting it. Trying to get two hands around it.
But sometimes you're going to have turnovers. You just have to overcome it.
THE MODERATOR: Thank you, Coach.

End of FastScripts

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