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TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY MEDIA CONFERENCE

November 12, 2011

Tommy Tuberville

OKLAHOMA STATE Â– 66
TEXAS TECH - 6

COACH TUBERVILLE: We pretty much changed everything up we've within doing on defense, tried to give ourselves a chance in both areas. At one time one would play the run, one would pay the pass. In the pass we hadn't had a lot of success being able to balance up, and so we overloaded today, and they took advantage of some of it. And it's -- it just went the other way on us. Got to give a lot of credit to Oklahoma State. That's a very good football team, and they brought it to us from play one and kept it all the way through the game.

Q. (Inaudible.)
COACH TUBERVILLE: Got to go to the next game. That's all I can tell them.

Q. (Inaudible.)
COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, I mean, you've got to lean on your seniors. We've got to go on the road for two games. We'll play two teams that are pretty good, playing well, but it's been all about us all year long. We got to a point about Oklahoma, we thought we were playing pretty good, and then we come back the next week and we played flat and we just never recouped. So we've got to -- we'll find out a lot about ourselves the next two weeks.
It's just disappointing. We knew we had to try to get this thing to the second half, somehow, some way, and offensively today we had no rhythm. Seth just -- I mean, they did a lot of good things on defense, and they did pretty much what a couple other teams did to us, and our protection broke down, they got all around him, and he pulled the trigger a couple times that he probably shouldn't have.
You know, you learn a lot. I told them at halftime, you learn a lot about yourself in a game like this, and I thought they come out and fought the second half. Again, offensively we didn't do much, but defensively we fought hard, they gave up a few plays. But it's a good football team.

Q. Do you think physically that your team was gassed?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, you know, we worry about that in practice, and we try to cut back a little bit in practice with some things that we're doing because we don't have a lot of guys that play in the game, and so when you run as many routes as we run on offense and throw as many balls, you know, we looked lethargic today. That's a good -- being gassed, looked pretty much what I thought, just watching us the first quarter, we didn't have any emotion, and I guess that -- it starts a lot with coaches, but if you don't have emotion in a game like this in terms of your seniors' last game, the wounded warrior game, it's got to be more physical than mental. I mean, it just has to be.
So we talked, and our coaches are talking to our players as we speak, and we'll find out some answers. A lot of the answers are they outmatched us in some areas, and we just didn't hold up. But we should score points. We should move the ball a lot better than that. We got pushed around. It looked like to me just from watching each play and a few replays that we got pushed around on the offensive line. We just didn't look as physical as we had in some of the games this year that we played.
When your quarterback has got to make all the plays from five yards deep instead of being able to run the ball a little bit and get some 1st downs, it really puts a lot of pressure on certain players. Seth had a tough day, but again, he's had that on his shoulders all year long. If he doesn't play well, we don't compete very well.

Q. (Inaudible.)
COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, you know, we looked good in the dressing room before the game. I think a lot of it just has to do with momentum. We just for some reason can't get the looks -- last week we drove down, we got great momentum, we score and we get a penalty on the 3-yard line. Today they took the wind, we're going into the wind, and it just looked like we never were focused on what we were doing, and we tried to do some things. We tried to run the ball into the wind a little bit, tried to run the clock, tried to get a little better field position knowing defensively we're not the strongest around. So that puts a lot of pressure on your offense, and sometimes that emotionally takes a lot out of you. There's no excuses; we've got 11 out there like they do. But we've just got to execute better, and again, I think it all comes back to being physical. We've got to be a more physical team on offense.
We try to be physical on defense, but sometimes everybody just looks at one guy to make that play, and sometimes he's not going to be able to make that play.

Q. Are you guys in danger of losing this team?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Oh, no. We've got good leadership. We got beat today. We got beat last week. We knew going into this year it was going to be tough, and that team out there today has not lost a game. As I told our players going in, we knew this going in, we knew we had to play above our heads to have a chance, and we probably -- the three turnovers just pretty much sealed our fate in terms of giving ourselves a chance to have that emotion to play, get to that second half and have a chance to play and get our fans involved. It just never materialized.

Q. (Inaudible.)
COACH TUBERVILLE: Yeah, you know, I knew they were good on offense. We watched all their games and how they played, and they're much more physical this year with their offensive line. Their running game is much better. That's really helped them. It gives them an opportunity to be balanced because when you get to teams that have very good offenses and defenses, you're going to have to just take everything off your quarterback. It's kind of a mirror of us. We can't take it off our quarterback but they were able to take it off him.
Defensively we watched them play. They are much better against the pass than we thought. Again, they ran the ball well. They jammed the receivers. They broke on our screen passes very well, and they tackled very well, and that's a sign of a good football team. They're not good, they've got a real good team, much improved, and that's just a sign of what they've done over the last four or five years, being able to bring players in.
And they have depth, too. They were able to run some players in on us, and our deal is to hopefully be able to get people tired, and we'd get another set in there that would be just as focused. Again, they pressed us and made good plays.

Q. (Inaudible.)
COACH TUBERVILLE: No, you know, we played Oklahoma, we forced some punts early, we were able to take some shots down the field, but heck, they scored 31 points on us so fast that our heads swum the second half. We were able to make plays with our quarterback in that game, and that was the difference in that game. Our quarterback played well, made big throws. We were able to run the draw play.
And then defensively for the first I'd say two and a half quarters, we played as good as we've played since I've been here, and then after that they came back. That's going to be a great game when they play.

Q. Your impression about how Douglas played.
COACH TUBERVILLE: He played pretty good. He struggled on press coverage. Of course that's pretty tough when you throw a kid out there and say, "You cover 81." I don't think there's many in this room that would like to do that. But he looked good at times. He had trouble rolling up in what we call cloud coverage and being able to stop the screen. He didn't know leverage on a few plays, whether to make the ball go inside or make it go outside. That's just inexperience mistakes, but he played good. He competed, made a couple of good plays, made some good tackles. I thought Osunde did the same thing on the other side, two guys that hadn't played corner all year long.
We've just got to go with guys that we feel like maybe that can -- might be a little bit more mature. Corn has been around -- even though he's played offense, I think he took some good angles and all those things in terms of really understanding football, and so did Osunde, a little bit older. So we'll look at the film and see where we're at. That'll just give us a little more depth. We're not playing all of them. Just playing those two is not going to be a factor.

Q. The crowd started to leave early the last couple games --
COACH TUBERVILLE: I didn't see them. I didn't see him them.

Q. (Inaudible.)
COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, they'll get a chance next year, September. We won't be back here this year. You can't blame our fans. We weren't very good last week and the week before that and this week. It's not their fault, it's our fault, so we're not going to point any fingers at anybody. I'm just glad they showed up and they were in Raider Walk. We've got to do our part.

Q. You talked about youth and inexperience on the defensive side of the ball, but what's the reason for the offensive struggle?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, that's what we're looking at. We talked about it at halftime and earlier we talked. It just looked like emotion. Again, you can't be one-sided. We can't put the ball in the quarterback's hands and he's got to make every play. He's got to be able to run it, our offensive line has got to be able to come off the ball and hit somebody and not get pushed back in the quarterback. We dropped some passes.
You know, it's football. We definitely didn't execute. We didn't look like the same team the first quarter this week as we did the last week in Austin, and that's for us to look and find out and get the right people out there.

Q. (Inaudible.)
COACH TUBERVILLE: Yeah, we didn't even get close. That's sports. You know, you go out and you play and you try to play as best you can, and today we put a lot of pressure on our defense because we changed a lot of things around, and we were hoping it would give us some plays early and our offense would be able to get going and get us a lead like we did at Oklahoma. But it just didn't work, and then three turnovers early just absolutely killed us. We can't get behind like that. I mean, we're just not good enough. We just have to go into these next two games and find reasons to get off to a good start.

Q. (Inaudible.)
COACH TUBERVILLE: Bad ankle. Might be a little bit more than that, and we lost Fisher. He's out. He'll be out for the year, knee. There's somebody else. Adam James, he got some -- something happened to his ribs.

Q. (Inaudible.)
COACH TUBERVILLE: Oh, yeah. We don't even talk about Bowls much. We're so far away from being a team right now that can have a chance to compete in a Bowl. We've got to get better. You don't want to go just to be going; you want to earn your way in. We've got a chance to win both of these or one of them or none of them. I mean, it just depends on how our guys react, and they will react. We've got good seniors, guys that have busted their tail and a lot of disappointment, and they understand they haven't played very well, and we haven't coached very well.
It'll be another week next week, it'll be on the road, and we'll see if we can improve.

Q. (Inaudible.)
COACH TUBERVILLE: Not having emotion? Well, emotion is usually momentum. Our guys were ready to play, we came out fired up, and then we just absolutely didn't do anything on offense, and we proceeded to give away 21 points in about eight or nine minutes. You can't have any emotion. I've never seen a team play with emotion when you get behind that quickly.
But they were ready to play. They were fired up. The seniors' parents were there, again, the Wounded Warrior Day, they were looking forward to it. We got beat by a good team, and they didn't come in, they weren't going to take us for granted, and as I said last week sometimes when you beat a team like Oklahoma you're going to get everybody's best shot, and we've gotten three in a row, and I'm sure we'll get the next two.

Q. (Inaudible.)
COACH TUBERVILLE: You know, one or 50, it doesn't make any difference.

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