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TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY MEDIA CONFERENCE

October 29, 2011

Tommy Tuberville

IOWA STATE Â– 41
TEXAS TECH - 7

COACH TUBERVILLE: Pretty obvious we got beat on both sides of the ball in the kicking game. Give all the credit to Iowa State. They came in ready to play and they took advantage of us not really focused, coaching or playing the first or second half. I take total blame for that. I saw a lot of it coming during the week.
We tried to do some things to try to get their mind going but these are young guys, as I told them, you learn from your experiences. And last week we had a great feeling about this time in the dressing room in Norman, Oklahoma, and tonight we had a different type of feeling. If you saw the guys in the dressing room, I think you saw that.
We have no reason why. We'll look at the film, try to improve from it. My gosh, we didn't do much right at all. Defensively we didn't play very well the first quarter, and offensively that was pretty much the worse performance we had in two years but you have to give credit to Iowa State. They came in, focused, and had a good game plan and did some things we hadn't seen and we didn't adjust very well.

Q. Is this a complete as loss as you've ever been a part of?
COACH TUBERVILLE: No, stay in this business, you go through -- you go through a lot. And the big thing is we learned from it today, from all the guys that played.
Looked like we just couldn't make a play on either side of the ball to get any momentum going. And when we started making a little momentum we got a 15-yard face mask penalty in the middle of the first quarter. It really knocked us for a loop.
There's no excuses. It starts with me. I didn't get it done. I didn't get them back off cloud nine quick enough and enough time to get things going.

Q. Do you think it might have been a hangover from such a great performance on the road?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, I mean, you know they get patted on the back and talked about. You know, it's hard to handle a lot of those things. But we're not going to blame it on that. You can't take anything away from Iowa State. They came in and lost four in a row, and they were bound and determined to play much better. Had that new quarterback.
It was kind of a changeup for us to see him, just a few plays last week, and look at the other guy. But don't take anything away from them. They did a great job. They earned it.
They whipped us on both sides, they whipped us coaching, and that's the bottom line. There's nothing other than that.

Q. Do you feel like, does this team know how to handle success?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, obviously not. But you know we won a few before. But last week, that was a big one for us. And I knew this was going to be a battle. I was hoping we could hang in there early and play better. But we just got no momentum. Nothing started going our way. They got all the momentum and never let go of it the entire game. That's one thing I've never been through, is momentum just switches a little bit to where we get something going.
But we got the ball on the fumble. We drive it 95 yards. Go for it on fourth and 1 and don't make it. And when you can't do that, obviously especially at home, everything's going to be very hard to get.
And there was nothing easy today. But, again, don't take anything away from Iowa State.

Q. (Question off microphone)
COACH TUBERVILLE: He got his shoulder hurt pretty bad early in the game. He's out. Probably out for a while.

Q. How hard is it to have the struggles you've had at home all year?
COACH TUBERVILLE: It's different. We've struggled but we fought back and got some momentum in both the other games. We gave ourselves a chance to win. This one was never, never in the game. If we did something on one side, the other side didn't do anything.
We've been pretty much an offensive football team as everybody's known. We've given up 30 or so points a game. But we've been able to score that many.
And if our offense takes the night off like it did tonight, we're going to struggle for the rest of the games, too. We're not good enough defensively to think we're going to win a ballgame 14-10.

Q. Alex Torres caught one ball, I'm not really sure, was there something that was wrong with him or he didn't get in the game very much?
COACH TUBERVILLE: No. I thought our offensive line did a decent job at times protecting to get the ball off. They just weren't going to give us anything deep. I think we got a little bit from last week, we got a little bit greedy thinking, hey, man, we can do this on anybody.
And we tried to throw the ball down the field. They did a good job undercutting us, and cutting our receivers off. Overthrew the ball a few times. Threw a couple of long interceptions.
But that's football. You've got to be able to adjust and make plays when they make adjustments, you've got to be able to adjust back, and we didn't offensively we didn't do that tonight at all.

Q. Surprised at all how well their quarterback played?
COACH TUBERVILLE: No, we could see on film he could run. He scared us to death running. And he did just that. We missed a lot of tackles the first quarter. The first quarter we just never got the ball back for our offense and decent field position to give ourselves a chance. The one time we did, we got that 15-yard penalty about 40-yard line and it really knocked us for a loop.
But I think we punted 10 times. And you can't run an offense like this and punt that many times. I mean, you've got to score some points, and if we're going to go fast, we gotta be able to score on a lot of those drives. We can't put our defense in a bind when they're struggling. And that's what we did.
We did very little on offense, and by doing that, we put our defense in a bind that's struggled all year anyway. And they're going to continue their struggles if they're put out there, if they're put in that situation that many times tonight after ten punts.

Q. Talk about the atmosphere being different building into this week. Can you further explain that?
COACH TUBERVILLE: You know, it was good. Obviously I thought we had good practices. I thought our guys were into it. But I think sometimes you look into it a little too much, as I told them, you know, we just beat a team that's one a gazillion games and getting ready to play a team that lost four in a row. And it's hard to explain why we weren't on the top of our game knowing we're going to get their best shot.
But we weren't. And, again, we just had no emotion. Coaching or playing. It was kind of like, hey, it's going to happen. We beat somebody last week, it's going to happen. But no matter who you're playing on the other side in college football, they also have a football team. They also play hard and they've got players and they've got good coaches.
And, again, I give them a lot of credit.

Q. Paul Rhoads, can you talk about him?
COACH TUBERVILLE: He did exactly what we thought he would do. They were going to try to run the football on us, do a little play action, and play pretty much what Kansas State did. Bend, don't break. They rolled their coverage up a little more than what we had seen in the past but we didn't adjust very well to it. You've got to be able to adjust as you go through a game and players have to understand it and coaches have to understand it. And the backups going in have to understand it. We just didn't do a very good job of changing gears.

Q. How do you fix this moving forward? Or is this just where you go?
COACH TUBERVILLE: It's one game. We've won five and we've lost three now. We're getting ready to head to a big rival next week down in Austin. It will be another challenge for us. Obviously there won't be the phone interviews for players and the attention on campus, and we go back to reality. And sometimes you have to have that. You gotta get knocked back to reality. Coaches all the way down to managers, players, everybody. That's what it is.
It's a three-hour game each week, and they're all different. And last week was different and this one was definitely different and next week will be different. So we'll be much better prepared next week. But we'll also find out if we understand how to get back up off the ground.
We're knocked on the ground for two weeks. We got back up last week. We're knocked back down again, let's see if we can get back up again. We'll have to have some new players out there. Again, we've got some guys beat up a little bit. So does everybody else.

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