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UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS MEDIA CONFERENCE

August 29, 2011

Manny Diaz

Q. How excited are you to play the game this weekend?
COACH DIAZ: There's a game this weekend?
It's always exciting, but when you take a new job, when you go somewhere -- the day I sat here on January whatever, that day you're looking out in that stadium and you're wondering what it's going to be like on game day. And then you meet your players, and you're wondering -- you really don't know how you're going to be until you get into a game. You can practice and you have your ideas based on your experience, but you haven't been in the proverbial battle with those guys yet. And that day is coming on Saturday.
To say that every day since that day in January that you haven't thought about that would be a lie. Every day at some point, whether you drive by the stadium or somehow, you say, we're going to play a game, and it's here. College football is -- of any sport we play the fewest games at any level, so they're special. I mean, these guys work immensely hard for 12 days, and we're excited they're here.

Q. (No microphone.)
COACH DIAZ: Yeah, I mean, I still think -- I think when you get in the game, you've got your headphones on, I think you're sort of more isolated from all that than you might think. And ideally I think as a coach what you really want to do on -- game day is the players' day, not the coaches' day. What I'm excited about game day is we can talk about our players. Everyone has talked about, hey, new coaches, and that's all been exciting, but the guys that deserve the credit is going to be the guys that run out there on the field, and I'm not going to sack anybody.
I look forward to talking about those guys this time next week and letting them play. That's my goal. Let them go play, let them go have the fun.

Q. (No microphone.)
COACH DIAZ: Yeah, I think Calvin, I don't think you can write the story on Calvin right now. There's two key points. One is the work with Coach Wylie and Coach Madden this summer and then two is the work with Coach Bo Davis. I think what you saw in Calvin is he had a confidence in his conditioning level and his strength that he had not had -- from what I had seen, he certainly didn't have it in the spring, and then with what Bo Davis has done with him in terms of his technique, his fundamentals improving, because that's a hard position to play. You're right there, surrounded by 300-pound men on both sides, and the only thing you can guarantee, one of them is going to hit you, at the minimum, if not both of them. So not a lot of guys who will sign up for that duty.
So it's hard to fake it in there. If you don't love that, if you don't really want to be in there, it's hard to fake enjoying playing interior defensive line. So I've got to have my confidence, and it's got to come from somewhere other than just hype. You can't talk yourself into being a great defensive tackle.
I think the work -- when I came in in August you could see a little bit of difference. When he was getting through the practices and all of a sudden said, I haven't done this before. Once you start doing something you haven't done before, you start looking around and saying, what else can I do that I haven't done before? That's where I saw the transformation in Calvin.
And then to me with Coach Davis, getting better fundamental wise, getting better lower pad level, using his hands, and that is still all a work in progress, but now I have something real that I can rely on. Well, what makes me a good player? My technique, my conditioning, my strength, my fundamentals, so I think that's what we've seen in Calvin this month.

Q. (No microphone.)
COACH DIAZ: Yeah, well, first game of the year in a new scheme, the first thing you're worried about is assignments. We can't have any pre-snap problems where we're beat before the ball is even snapped. Rice is going to present pre-snap problems to us because they're a different style of offense than what we've seen through spring ball and August camp, and they're going to do it with tempo. They're going to no-huddle us and do some things. They're going to ask us questions before the ball is even snapped that we don't have the answer to. If we're already beat, there's nothing we can do about it. That's the first challenge.
Second challenge in game one, regardless of who you play, is tackling. Everyone in college football, because of the scholarship numbers, there's only so much we can tackle live bodies during August camp, so with a guy like McGuffie, they're going to throw the ball out in space, they're going to try to get us in one-on-one -- the spread offense in theory is designed to make one-on-one tackles. That's what they want. They want us to tackle the running back one-on-one, the quarterback one-on-one, a wide receiver on the screen one-on-one, and we will drill tackling to death and everything like that, but you have to tackle in games to be good at tackling in games.
Unfortunately one of the things that's unfortunate as a coach is we all get to find out together on Saturday where we're at as a tackling team. I'd rather be able to tell you we're ready to go, but there's certain things we have to find out on game day. That's the second thing.
And then we they do possess a challenge down the field for us. They've got two guys that measure 6'5" that they'll get down in the red zone and they're going to throw them jump balls and their guys have scored a bunch of touchdowns. They can just go get it. To me, in the running game, the passing game and then the quarterback who can keep plays alive, he's got good pocket presence, just sort of a gamer, good player, sort of in all three phases they ask us questions that we have to be ready for.

Q. (No microphone.)
COACH DIAZ: Yeah, what I meant by that, and it's -- even now we're two weeks beyond that point, the scheme is when the guys get it, and as a coach we're a fixer, so we've been fixing it, fixing it, now we've just got to get into a game to really find out -- there's only so many mistakes -- let me put it this way: There's only so many things you can correct in practice. You've got to get in the game, and then the players are, oh, I understand now because this play cost us a 1st down or a touchdown or a 40-yard gain or something like that. You don't want that to happen as a coach. You want to try to alleviate all those issues in practice if you can, but if that happened then no one would ever make a mistake and every game would be a virtual tie. That's what we're going to find out.
And then what I'm excited about is I can come in Sunday and I've got something to fix now. You try to anticipate your problems, you've gotten the team as good as you can get through practice, we're all in a stage now we're polishing. You know what I mean? We're polishing, and then we'll go play and find out where we're at.

Q. Does that also hold true for young guys?
COACH DIAZ: There's no doubt. And when you're new, that goes for everybody, because I have no idea how we're going to react when adversity hits. And that's what happens in a game. In a game you get real, live adversity. You can try in a scrimmage, but it's still a scrimmage. They know. They're fake points that get scored. They're fake yards that happen in a scrimmage. The yards on Saturday are going to be real, and the points, we're actually keeping score for real on Saturday. When adversity strikes, will we panic? Who will really step up? And as a coach, same thing. We can sit around and predict as well as you can, but you really don't know your guys.
Now, when you've been somewhere a couple years, you've been with your players -- they don't know me. Will I panic? Will I go crazy? That's what we're all coming to terms with. You cannot simulate being in a game. You've just got to get in the game, and then we'll all get a good sense of who we are and then we'll move on from that.

Q. (No microphone.)
COACH DIAZ: Well, I think it's very important how you define a sluggish and slow start because what you have to make sure is that there's a method to winning a football game, no different than there's a method to winning a boxing match. What you don't want is you don't want the players -- this can happen very easily, you get them so worked up -- you say, the whole idea is to run out there and with the first punch, one-punch knockout, and then you throw that punch and your opponent is still sitting there, and you say, you were supposed to fall down, and they're still there. So I think I look at it differently. I look at it as more of a grinding attitude that I want our team to adopt.
Let's go take whoever we go play, and let's just go grind with them for three hours, and at the end of the three hours, the 60 minutes of football, let's see where the scoreboard lies. I think if you do that what you're really focusing on is the play-by-play element of the game, instead of trying -- it's not fair -- and this is true for any two teams playing, it's not fair for one team to try to have to make a statement over another team to try to win early or win with points; you see what I'm saying? Because that's not how the game works. All we're trying to do is fundamentally be hard to move the ball against, be hard to score on. Offensively we're trying to do the same thing in reverse.
I think that's standard and that's always the pressure when you're playing at home. That may not be who we are. You know what I mean? If we can get everybody to hit the canvas with a series of 500 body blows, it's going to take 500 body blows, and we have to be prepared to win the fight that way, and when I say we, that's players, coaches, the 100,000 in the stands, everybody. If we can find the chin, we're going to find the chin, but we're plenty confident to work the body in the meantime.

Q. (No microphone.)
COACH DIAZ: Yeah, I think when we came back early on during camp, I think what we saw with Garrett was a guy that was more confident in what we were doing schematically, you know what I mean, that could make all the throws. And I think it was being comfortable with the offense, what Coach Harsin wants.
We try really hard defensively to be a pain in the butt to the quarterbacks. I mean, it's almost kind of what we do. We should, through the course of 29 days, put quarterbacks in bad positions. That's just what -- in practice, because we're not scheming against each other, there's just a chance we're going to call some things that are going to make -- that should put the offense in a bad play in practice because they're not schemed against us. So that's kind of one of the fun things is watching how they manage that and how they manage that situation. How do they manage on practice 15 when just three plays in a row it just doesn't work out right for the offense, because then it can happen in reverse, as well.
And I think that's what's been apparent through Garrett for the 25 days or whatever we've been so far, I think he's done a great job of managing the offense, managing the highs and lows. The guys say, okay, yeah, this works, and we can win this way.

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