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UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS MEDIA CONFERENCE

November 7, 2011

Manny Diaz

Q. Is the defense kind of figuring it out, so to speak, over the last couple weeks, what you want from them?
COACH DIAZ: I believe we're getting better, which as a coach is all you want to see, because that's all we've talked about week in and week out is how we can improve ourselves, and we've tried really, really hard to be a performance-based defense more so than result-based defense, because you focus on your performance, specifically do the results work out the way you want to.
I do think our guys are playing with more confidence. The more confident you are in what you're doing, by nature the more physical you can play because you can be more aggressive; someone that knows what they're doing does it more aggressively than someone that doesn't, and I think those things are showing up on the field.

Q. Can you explain the different type of challenge this week presents because of the way Franklin can run?
COACH DIAZ: Yeah, well, first of all, they're an excellent running football team. They are what I would consider advanced level. They're graduate classes level run game. They're really good at what they're doing. Schematically they cause you a lot of problems before the ball is even snapped by the way they line up and motion guys into and out of the backfield, and then on top of all that, they have a quarterback that's a run threat, so anytime the quarterback is a runner, it evens the count defensively, gives them an extra blocker in the run game.
So they're big and experienced up front, and I think they've got a home run hitter in that running back. They really have all of the elements of a great running football team, and their numbers obviously back it up.
The number one challenge, though, like it is every week, is we have to make them one-dimensional. We have to do our best to try to slow down the run game. I don't know that it's completely stoppable from what's been put on film, but we have to stand up to that challenge.

Q. What about with a running back like Josey that's so small? How much more difficult is that when you can't see him and he kind of hides behind his offensive line? What's the challenge?
COACH DIAZ: I think the number one challenge with him is his speed. If we all play our gaps like I always say, he'll come to us if we're all where we're supposed to be. The problem with a guy like him is, I wish he was small and slow, but he's not. I'm not sure if he's the smallest guy in the world; I think he's pretty much decent sized for a running back. But the issue is if you make a mistake and somebody ends up not in their gap and they do a lot of things that cause you to think about where you should be, and if you guess wrong, he can go all the way. And we've seen that when we've played well, we've not allowed explosive runs, and when we've not played well, we have. I mean, there's a lot of things you can look at, but number one deal will be to try and limit their explosive runs.

Q. Did you get to watch the LSU-Alabama game and maybe appreciate it more than some of the offensive minds would appreciate it?
COACH DIAZ: I mean, I was going back and forth because I was watching Missouri and the K State game. There was a lot of really great games on, of course. But that game, there's a lot of big people that can run really fast running into each other really hard. So yeah, it's not for the faint of heart, and beauty is the in the eye of the beholder, but defensively there were some war daddies running around out there.

Q. From a coaching standpoint, what do you tell your defense about how to take this last month of the season when they get knocked around and you might tend to lose focus?
COACH DIAZ: Yeah, I think what we do now, now you want to make the big push, but what you hope, and this is true in football and life, what you hope what happens is that you fall back on a core set of values, of beliefs that transcend inspiration. You know, if we just do things a certain way -- let's just be who we've been. Let's just do things the way we've done them and continue to improve and build on that. But understand that when we don't give long touchdowns we're hard to beat. Understand when we stand up in the red zone and make you kick field goals we're hard to score on, and continue the things that are working well for you, and at the same time try to fix some of the things that we're maybe not doing as good as we'd like to; let's cause more turnovers, let's do a better job on 3rd down defense than we did this past weekend.
The funny thing, we've been preaching those things since Rice, but the players have seen now through our eight-game rÃ©sumÃ© how it works and how it wins ballgames, and that's all we ever talked about; all we want to do is win by any means necessary. We just want to win the football game. And we know what wins now.

Q. Emmanuel said you told the defense you have four weeks left to write your story. What was the message you gave to them?
COACH DIAZ: Well, this is a -- obviously when you play here or when you coach here, the great history of this school always follows you. Coach Brown does a great job, he'll show old videos of Texas playing whatever team it is that we're playing, and that was sort of my challenge, especially to our older guys: How are we going to talk about this team in years to come? Are we going to say, hey, we were able to finish this way? I always say, thank God we had that guy, thank God we had that guy. Well, go be that guy. Be the guy that when it's all said and done, that when people look back at this team two years from now and they say, well, you know what, because they had this guy and this guy made this play, that's what got it done. And that's what's great about this place because that's where you can stamp your legacy that people will remember for a long time, and that's really what we're enjoying about this football team because this football team is all about building and pushing and just getting better every week.

Q. Do you notice a lack of satisfaction from them? They're not just happy getting the sixth win and getting the Bowl eligibility? They want more?
COACH DIAZ: I do, because this team has never been a destination-oriented team. This is just a -- let's just push, we're still becoming something, we're gaining an identity, but I think week in and week out it's becoming more obvious I think to the naked eye who we are. And the neat thing about that is that that's something you want to travel with every week. The idea of being a physical football team, we're going to go play a very physical football team in Missouri, but you know what, if I'm a player I can go to bed at night because I know that that physicality is going to travel. We don't have to worry about does it show up. We can make sure it shows up.

Q. How much does it help you defensively to know that this offense can run like it is and take so much time off, and does that change what you're able to do when you're not necessarily on the field as much?
COACH DIAZ: Well, there's not a doubt. Our offense controls the football game with their ability to run the football and run the clock and keep the other team's offense off the field. You know, offenses are all about rhythm, and you know, certainly it's our job to try and take them out of rhythm, which we can, but on offense possessing the football by nature takes the other team's offense out of rhythm because they're sitting on the sideline, and they're sitting there and they're wondering when they're going to go back out there again, the quarterback is throwing to wide receiver on the bench. And then if we can go out there and get a three-and-out and all of a sudden they walk off the sideline and they're saying, I don't know when we're going to get the ball back again, and that's really what you want, and again, it comes back to being able to run the football and not letting the other team run the football.
Those are still -- and we didn't invent it. That's only been true since this game was invented, but I think our guys are really relishing in it.

Q. You talked about making them one-dimensional. What do you want to force them to do this weekend?
COACH DIAZ: Well, obviously we want to force them to throw, but that's not because of an indictment on their passing game because they're pretty good at throwing the football. There's an old adage, if they can run when they want to, they can throw when they want to; if they can't run when they want to, they have to throw because they have to, and I felt like it's a little bit what happened last Saturday. And when you throw, you will usually get yards, but sometimes it's hard to get points because that's when the sack comes in, that's when the holding penalty comes in. It's just really hard to execute the throw game. This is not just about Texas or Tech or Missouri, this is just ball, that it's very hard to execute the throw game on long drives. And if we don't give up big plays, which we didn't this past weekend, it's really hard to score a lot of points throwing it every snap if you're not getting explosive plays.

Q. Missouri has had a weird knack for scoring a lot of points in the fourth quarter, maybe not as many in the first three. Have you noticed anything on film that they're doing better in the fourth quarter, wearing teams down?
COACH DIAZ: Well, they do wear you down, and I felt like that's a challenge of all tempo offenses. That's something where even with us, the numbers of players that we play, our depth especially in the secondary and the back seven in particular, where you have to rotate guys more, we probably could have done that a little bit more even this past Saturday. And that's a testimony to their coaching staff. They have a great coaching staff, and they're not going to quit. They're not going to stop, and like I said, they are built by their nature to come from behind because they're always either in a five-wide-receiver look or a four-wide-receiver look and they have a very good passing game, and because of the running quarterback you're constantly in a little bit of a conflict in terms of what you want to do on defense.
They are relentless, and that's why they're averaging 500 yards a game and all the points that they're scoring.

Q. You played a lot of young guys particularly early against Tech. Is that something we're going to see more of?
COACH DIAZ: I think it's assured we are, and again, what we've shown is to make it through these games we have to have these young guys come through for it. They're not young anymore. That's part of it, too, now. We're almost in mid November, and they're just now all Longhorns. Whoever is out on the field, the 11, they've just got to go play for us. We cannot make it through this last month, especially with the next three games being in a condensed time period, we can't make it with just 11 or 12 or 13 defenders.

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