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TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY MEDIA CONFERENCESeptember 19, 2011Tommy TubervilleCOACH TUBERVILLE: All right. Players of the week for this week's game, offensive scout team player was Derek Edwards. Scout team defensive player was Scott Smith, who did a very good job for us and we're getting Scott in shape in terms of getting ready to play here in a few weeks. Special teams player of the week is Jared Flannel. Defensive player of the week Terrance Bullitt. Offensive player of the week and Big 12 player of the week Seth Doege. Proud of all these guys. And proud of the entire team how we prepared through the open date. And we really stunk it up in the first game other than about the seven or eight minutes of the game on both sides of the ball. So we regrouped. And as young guys do, which is very fortunate for us, they forget pretty quick things that they did yesterday. And they improved immensely going into this game, not just in the game but also in practice. We got a lot better. Even though we did start a few new guys that didn't start the week before at linebacker or defensive end, there will be consistent changes each week in the starting lineup. As I said before, each week we won't announce a lot of them because everybody will play pretty much that we take the games that we dress out on defense and offense. We're just looking for the right combination, for the right guys to put in certain situations, see how they grow and how much better they get, whether better coming off the bench or whether better starting. But we're not even close to being where we can be with our potential, but that's known by everybody because we're very young, and we'll get better each week, as long as we can stay healthy. Last week we lost Aaron Crawford in practice. He pulled a hamstring. He didn't even make the trip. We had Beau Carpenter, went out with headaches, and they decided to keep him out. He did not make the trip. Those are things that we can't control. And we're asking younger guys to step up and play in their place. So it's going to be a smorgasbord of starting lineups and backups and who plays and who doesn't play. But the one thing I liked about this game, it was kind of business-like on the road. First time a lot of these guys had not traveled, played in a college football game. Going through difficult circumstances of sitting and waiting and watching. We probably had the longest drive in the history of college football, 17-play drive, an hour an six minutes. That was very interesting how we started it, down somewhere inside the 5 and finished it and scored. It was very productive. But it was a good game in terms of having success. We controlled the tempo from the beginning to the end. And the way we play, that's very encouraging, because that's very hard to teach. It's very hard to come by other than just going out and getting it done. But proud of the offensive line. They were ridiculed last week after the first game. They got pushed around by a team that weren't expected to get pushed around by. They stepped up this week, played much better. We played several combinations on the offensive line. We played everybody that we took other than the Le'Raven Clark on the offensive line. So it all starts there. And Seth Doege was able to complete all those passes because he's comfortable in the pocket, stepped up. Didn't get touched very much. Was on rhythm and it all starts with the snap and starts with the guards and center and tackles and protection with the backs. And I thought the backs did much better at their protection also from the week before. We caught the ball. There was some passes that were not perfectly thrown, as we saw a lot of those, and we caught those passes, and you need to do that. We had third and eight on the first drive. They went what we call zero coverage, straight up man. We picked up the blitz. It wasn't a great route by Darrin Moore. He caught the ball, made somebody miss and scored. That's what you have to do. When you're a big guy like Darrin, you're going to accumulate a lot of defensive backs and linebackers in the zone. But when you get man coverage, you have to take care of it with your size, height and speed. And he did a good job on that play. And we were able to go from there. And then turn around, we kicked. And defensively, after four or five plays, we tipped the ball, made the interception, went in and put it in 14-0. And then the floodgates opened. But it's a team game. We're not going to win games this year just on offense. We're not going to win them just on defense or special teams, we've got to win it -- everybody's got to be on the same page and understand our strength and weaknesses and get our guys to continue to improve. So as I told them yesterday in this room, we have got to get much better. Things will get tougher as we go. Nevada is 1 and 1. They didn't play as well in their first game as they would hope in a tough environment against Oregon. Their speed caught up to them a little bit as they've been able to handle a lot of people with the speed they have up in Oregon. And then last week, against San Jose, they took advantage of some mistakes. They played much better. They did make some mistakes, But Coach Ault is a very good coach. And you hear about his frame of voice, kind of like mine, after the first game, they won the game but they can't keep making those mistakes. We're in the same situation. So it will be the best team that we played to this point. And so we're looking forward to another week, not just a game of practice of trying to get the guys better and better, make sure we got them in the right positions. We did condense a little bit of our defense last week. We didn't do quite as much just because of a new linebacker starting, new defensive end starting, and I thought we looked much better. We did give up a few big plays, which was disappointing. Long passes. Should have been a touchdown on the first play of the game, post-route, got out-ran, out-techniqued and fortunately we were able to overcome that and we can make something positive of it rather than something that could have gone the other way. Injury report, Leon Mackey is much better. He's improving very fast. But he will still be out this week. Hopefully as we get through this week and also Justin Keown, we'll have a little bit better idea where they are by the end of the week. We would have loved to have taken Leon with us but they wouldn't let him fly because of his depressed, I guess what you call it, depressed lung. So he wasn't able to make the trip. Justin Keown did make the trip, as a lot of other guys did that were first-timers. Good game for us. It wasn't even close to being perfect, as we could tell a little bit on defense. But offensively they pretty much controlled the game and put it out of reach pretty quick. Questions? Q. You mentioned earlier about the short memory after the Texas State game. Do you feel that way after the good offense performance, is it important for them to forget that or is there a fine line you want to utilize -- COACH TUBERVILLE: We talked to them about the same thing you just said. When you play bad, you gotta forget about it and go back try to get better. If you play good like we did on offense, that's not going to carry over to the next game. Different defense to face, different type of personnel, different type of schemes. If you ever think you've gotten to the Promised Land, it's only a short trip to the next game, you find out pretty quick, you feel good about yourself, and things won't happen quite as easy. So, again, it all starts with being able to run the ball a little bit better. Offensive line protecting. If that happens, we do have good receivers. I thought Eric Ward really played an excellent game, his best game since he's been here. He made catches across the middle, as we talked about after the game about trying to find somebody that will catch a post route, catch a deep post, take the pressure off Darrin Moore, because he's not going to be able to be the only factor in the game once we get to games like the one coming up of people on the other side, have good players, have players that can compete with the height that he has and we've got to be able to spread the ball around as we did last Saturday. Q. Did you know Doege was capable of something like that all along, or were you kind of watching -- COACH TUBERVILLE: Just like you. The thing about it, again, is quarterbacks, when they have time in the pocket, especially in the type of offense we have, you can complete a lot of passes. A lot of them weren't deep balls. They were short passes. Checked downs. The thing that I was most impressed with, I know he can throw the ball, but you gotta throw it to the right guy and the person that's open and go through your reads. And I was more impressed with that than I was the 40 completions of throwing it to the right guy. Sometimes you'll complete a ball, but it's not the right guy. You could go somewhere else, more production, and down the road you're going to have to make those right decisions. And Saturday he was on. He would go through his checked downs and understand why he threw and why he didn't. And he got in trouble one time with me on fourth and four you don't throw a go-route. You don't do it. You get the first down, if you don't throw a go-route throw it on first down. He's managing the game better. I think that's something he's got to understand. Sometimes you can get a little overconfident. I mean, to me that's overconfident when you've got the ball on the 35 or 40-yard line and I say, okay, go for it, head coach says go for it, doesn't mean to throw a 60-yard pass. You want to try to get the first down and control the ball, keep your defense off the field. Those are little things that he will understand as he goes through it. Even though they were giving us the go-route and pressing, we had some thing, other things he could go have gone to to get the first down, go back to the huddle and keep going. But that's one moment there that probably good that we got that out of our system and understand, hey, what we've got to do to win games, not get overbearing in terms of, hey, let's take it all at once. Q. Kind of touched on this about being overconfident, how do you keep your team from doing that? COACH TUBERVILLE: All they have to do is go back a little bit and we don't let them forget the things that they did. We were by far not perfect in this game in terms of what we did and how we did it. So there were some things that we would like to have back. But those things happen in a game. What you try to do is you eliminate as many of the negatives as you can in a game. The turnover was big. The fourth down and four, I mean, that's just like a turnover. I think that there were other situations where we could have played much better. But our guys know. And you throw the film on of a team that we're getting ready to play this week, those guys on that screen go a lot faster than the ones that we've been playing against. And so it's speed that really causes everybody problems. And that's the reason we cut back a little bit on defense was to be able to play faster defensively. And we played much faster in this game than we did the first game. We're better assignment-wise. But when you're better assignment-wise you know what you're doing, you can play faster. We've got to continue to do that defensively. We're a long ways away on defense. We're obviously up here offensively and down here defensively, and we've got to start bringing that closer to together before we have a chance to even say, hey, we've got a good football team. We played a good game. Obviously we had the best team. We had a chance to play good. The great thing about it is we took advantage of that. We didn't go out and kick it around. And kind of like we did last year, last year we had it going pretty good for us against New Mexico in the first half. Had a couple of touchdown lead. All of a sudden they score twice right before we go in. They're back in the game. This time that didn't happen. When we came back out, we took advantage of our opportunities. Q. (Question off microphone)? COACH TUBERVILLE: And it's a little bit what we were doing. We were trying to stop the run. We weren't going to let the quarterback run around. And we played a lot of matchup man coverage, putting seven, eight in the box. Their quarterback hurt Arkansas. Hurt Colorado State. And when you go into a game you look at what your best is against their best. And you try to stop their best and their best was quarterback scrambling making big plays and he had, what, 35, 40 yards. That pretty much did what we needed to do. Now, when you do that, you've got to be able to understand you might give up some passes but not the deep ones. You've got to understand your depth, your alignment, whether you're inside or outside. Those are little things that we have not even come close to getting over to our players. But a lot of it you can talk all you want to in practice but when they see something different in terms of formations or different personnel, which they had in the game -- a lot of their personnel was different than what they had the previous week -- players didn't understand the speed of the guy or what they needed to do. And we got out-ran. I'd say three times in the game we just, we got out-techniqued and we got out-thought about how to play that certain receiver. So hopefully -- we won the game, we learned from those experiences and we go from there. But first play of the game we just basically got out-techniqued and out-ran by their wide receiver. They just didn't execute it and luckily make the play for us. Q. What did you like from Texas State to Saturday's? COACH TUBERVILLE: We looked more confident playing. And we played a lot faster. We played faster -- guys were able to get more pass rush. We stopped the run a lot better. We worked all week on containing the quarterback, not losing contain. Not letting him out. I thought our pursuit angles were not as good. We missed some open field tackles on some screens. Sometimes you're not going to make the tackle but you gotta make sure you use the number one tackler on the field. Your best tackler on the field is the sideline. And you don't let them cut back into the field. And we did that a couple of times by overpursuing them on a reverse. The quarterback reversed out and ran it about 60 yards, only gained about 10. But we should have had them in the back field. There's little things like that in major college football you gotta understand that sometimes you're not quite the athlete as that guy with the ball. And what you need to do is make sure that you use the sideline, use your proper angles and let the calvary get there and let the calvary help you. You can't do it all on your own. Those are the things we need to learn as we go through these games and this one more non-conference game before we get into the conference game in two weeks. Q. What concerns you about Nevada this week? COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, they're balanced. Chris Ault is a very good coach. They had a great football team last year and they're kind of rebuilding, kind of like we are in terms of a quarterback and running backs and receivers. They've got a good scheme. They don't panic. Their problem so far at this point is they've turned the ball over and they've had penalties. You can't win a lot of games, as we know, of doing that. And you just hear him talk about the same frustrations that we had pretty much the first week of not doing the little things right. But they've got two quarterbacks. They do throw the ball. They throw it down the field a lot. They moved it on Oregon. They just got behind so quick. They got them out of their running game. They like to run the ball, they run the pistol offense. And a little bit similar to what we run. Their offensive line is -- they lost a couple of starters. They did lose their tight end in the first game to an injury, and so they're trying to put all the pieces together as we are with a lot of younger players. Defensively, they lost some defensive linemen, but they're very good at linebacker and defensive backs. They've got a lot of speed. And this will be a true test for our offense in terms of running their offense versus man coverage and zone coverage and being able to, again, keep the rhythm and tempo. That's the type of team that we are is try to keep the tempo and keep it moving and making plays and, again, scoring a lot of points. We score a lot of points against most anybody, if we keep our composure no matter who is on the other side. So we don't change a lot of our offense from week-to-week depending on what we see. We just change our personnel and how we play them and where we play them. It's more of a personnel game matchup against what they do on defense. Q. Do you have any type of relationship with Chris Ault? COACH TUBERVILLE: Not really. I've called him a few times. Talked to him. Tried to hire a couple of people off his staff over the years. He's done the same with me. That's what happens in our business. But he's been there a long time. And he's done probably as good a job as anybody in the country's done with their team in such a long period of time. They've been consistent and they know what they want to do. It's the type of team that worries you, that they have an offense and defense and they don't stray from it too far. They teach it and their players play it. And they're not one of these fly by night teams that's going to change anything. They do a good job of being physical on offense in terms of running and they can throw it down the field. Q. How much of the pistol stuff is kind of borrowed from what they -- COACH TUBERVILLE: I think they pretty much started it. It kind of started over the years from other teams. We just -- we're all thieves, coaches are. If somebody's doing something good that we think that might work with the personnel that we have, you look at it. And if it works for you, you continue to build on that. And this is our first go-around with any pistol at all. We don't do a whole lot but we do some. And I think it's good for us. I think it's good for us on the play action game. It's good for our running backs to be able to go to both sides of the line of scrimmage, not kind of give away their strength, so to speak. So I think it's going to be good for us. Obviously they know a heck of a lot more about it than we do because they've been running it for a while. Q. You said you play faster. My mother-in-law asked me: Are we faster this year? So I'll ask you, are you just playing faster, more comfortable, or is the team actually faster? COACH TUBERVILLE: No, we're faster. We're faster on offense and defense, on both sides of the ball. I think we're stronger. Last year, as I talked to you, I thought we were very weak, lower body; we were pretty strong upper body. I think we're better in those areas. We were much quicker on the defensive line in how we play and the calls that we make, we let our guys move around. We slant quite a bit. We zone blitz quite a bit. I think we utilize what we have more. But our strength and conditioning coaches have done a very good job. Again, we don't get that tired. But I think a lot of that has to do with, if you look at Jackson Richards, for instance, normally a starting defensive end for us, last year would have played 60 plays, he played 30, 32. And that would have been how many he would have played whether it was a close game or not because we have guys we can put in to try to keep them fresh. So a little bit different. But offensively we're definitely faster. I think Eric Stephens has gotten faster and quicker and playing all the wide receivers that we play, we look fast. But we're going to need to continue to do that, because we're -- as I said, the teams on the other side are getting faster also. Q. Do you enjoy the West Coast? COACH TUBERVILLE: Oh, yeah, I enjoy going out there, yeah. I enjoy it. Q. Have you talked to them about the discussions about (inaudible)? COACH TUBERVILLE: I still haven't given up on us keeping this thing together. I think there's still a possibility of -- and you hear all this talk, and most of it is just rumors and speculation. You know, we would know something. Obviously we're not as aggressive because I think Chancellor Hance, President Bailey would love to keep this thing all together with all the other teams that have been with us. I thought we really were on the verge of it a couple of weeks ago of this thing going south. But I think there's a true effort out there by several teams that have a lot to say about this, of keeping the Big 12 intact and maybe growing it. Saying that, you know obviously that there's other talk going on. As you can see on the East Coast from teams are starting to say, okay, this thing's getting serious we better try to fill ours up and try to change our rules of defection money-wise. You saw that with the ACC. And hopefully we can keep all this together. But there's a lot of talk, and there's a lot of different avenues that some people can take. I just hope we'll be able to keep this thing together the way it is and for us to grow and go out and take some people to come in with us. Q. (Question off microphone)? COACH TUBERVILLE: I talked to President Bailey and Chancellor Hance and Kirby once a day about what's going on. And pretty much we hear -- you don't know a lot behind the scenes. They don't even know a lot. They just know that there's discussions going on about several different things, which as I just said, one mainly about keeping this thing together. I mean, that's not -- it's not a done deal that this thing is going to explode. Now, there's a lot of smoke, but you've seen none of that fire yet coming up. I think there's still a very good chance we can hold onto this thing if we just do it the right way and everybody comes to their senses before this thing implodes. But whatever happens, I feel we're in very good shape of what's going to happen with the facilities that we have now, the interest and the community, the airport that we have, I think we're a good candidate for whatever happens. But as we all want and have talked with Chancellor Hance, Bailey and Kirby and even the other head coaches, we'd love for this thing to stay together. Q. (Question off microphone) ? COACH TUBERVILLE: I've gone everywhere. If we do go somewhere else, most of our recruiting is going to be in the state of Texas anyway. That's where we'll get most of our players. We'll go other places and look, but I think for what we have in terms of high school players in this state, it's crazy to go much farther. Last year we went out different boundaries just because we were behind. And we had to go out just because most of the players were already committed and we had to go. But the longer we are here the base we have will be consistent from the state. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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