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TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY MEDIA CONFERENCEOctober 13, 2012Tommy TubervilleWEST VIRGINIA – 14 COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, what a game. Who would have ever thought that that game would have been pretty much put away going into the fourth quarter. Really proud of our players. Man, they worked hard all week. I thought the game plan on both sides, offense and defense, was great. We really played to the wind well in terms of the wind blowing on the field. It wasn't too much of a factor on the passes, but the kicking game was pretty rough. Overall, I can't be any prouder for all of them. Last week was very disappointing. We knew it was a great football team we were playing. We caught them at a tough time. Just didn't make enough plays. Today though, we went into the game, stopped a run on defense. Sounds crazy, but we were just going to absolutely just make them beat us throwing the ball. Then we pressed the receivers. We pressed them, and they're good throwing the go routes and it got them out of the rhythm. All the defenses coaches did a great job. Then on offense, how about our quarterback? They come out. They saw that he had been getting pressure the last couple of weeks. We worked hard on keeping them off of him and giving him one extra second to throw the football, and he absolutely played perfect. It was fun to watch. The running game got going. Offensive line was outstanding. All of our receivers, just everything kind of fit into place. I want to say something about the fans too. The you stuck with us. The ones that were there today, I noticed it wasn't quite full, which was a little bit disappointing playing a team like that. But the ones that were here, huge difference, huge difference. Want to thank everybody for doing that. That was huge. We've got a good team. We knew that going into the season. We're halfway through. We've had one blip on the screen. We're not going to celebrate this one past tomorrow. We're going to go back to work and make sure to understand that if you win, you come back and work hard. If you lose, you come back and work hard. I'm really proud of this group in the first half of the season. Q. What kind of second was that by your defense considering the other side? COACH TUBERVILLE: They played good all year long. Our defense has come to play every game. We held last week's team to 370 yards. There are just some areas that we've got to shore up. Last week we didn't get much pass‑rush, and we didn't adjust to what they were doing. This week we made him move his feet in the pocket. We didn't get to him that much but made him move. Moved to his right, to his left. He was noticing that we were around him, and when you do that, it knocks the timing off from the passing routes. So our defensive front did a great job. Gave a little bit too much up in the running game, but once we got the lead, we were going to try to make them run it and try not to give up the deep ball, and it worked pretty good. Q. That was one thing they came in with something like 35 plays with 20 yards or more. They had one today. Keep them in front of you? COACH TUBERVILLE: The big thing when you play teams like that is us. When you catch the ball, you have to tackle. Last week we gave up 150 yards after contact, and that was the game. I mean, we did not tackle them very well. This group had about as dangerous a group of receivers and a running back that we've played since I've been here. We work on tackling every day. I was really proud of Cody Davis. I think he made 13 tackles. There were several times that he was one‑on‑one matched up as several of our players were, against the number one open field. Got to get him down. Most of the time they did that. They didn't get a lot of yards after he caught the ball, and it all comes down to tackling. We've tackled pretty well all year long. Got a lot of room for improvement. But, again, it was a total team effort everywhere. But I was really proud of our corners. Cornelius Douglas went down about the second play of the game. He stretched a ligament. Hopefully he'll be back soon. Doesn't look too serious. Bruce Jones goes into the game. He made two heck of a plays on go routes knocking the ball out. I told him when he went in, you've just got to play and just play the best you can, play relaxed because the offense is going to be on your side. Offense is going to score some points and you play aggressive and he did that as all of them did. Q. You talk about SaDale Foster, and you said in the fall you were a SaDale Foster guy. I think you're probably really liking him now. COACH TUBERVILLE: He keeps getting it done. He's not very big, but he's got great vision. In a game like that where you just‑‑ they know that we're going to pretty much every time they ran it, they knew we were going to give it to him when he started playing. They had five or six until the box and he keeps making plays. The one right before the half we ran a power play that Neal had put in, and the offensive coaches did a great job on the running game. They did a great job on all of it, but the running game really, really kept them offset in the second half. That play by SaDale was huge. The offensive staff just did a superior job of taking their time, not losing their patience. Knowing last week and the week before was kind of tough, but they knew they had it in them. Players believed in it. But Neal Brown and his guys did absolutely wonderful. Q. Can you speak a little more to Seth? Obviously he had a rough outing last week, and people talked about whether he's the guy to respond the way he did. COACH TUBERVILLE: Yeah, Seth Doege is a good quarterback. He threw for almost 500 today. I mean, that is outstanding. The good thing about Seth now is he knows where to throw the ball, and it was unfortunate‑‑ he threw a good pass on the interception, it was just one of those that got bobbled and the guy made a great play. But Seth is a football player. He's hard‑nosed, and he ran the ball today. I about fell out when he ran the ball, and he made a couple first downs. It was just good to see. The success that he had today, I think a lot of people across the country saw it because everybody matches quarterback when's you watch them on television, and they've got a great quarterback. That kid is a player. I thought Seth obviously did a heck of a job in just running our offense. Running the ball, taking the screens when they gave it to him, throwing the ball deep and making big plays. It was just fun to watch him have success as all the players. Q. Talk about the protection? COACH TUBERVILLE: The protection was good. We changed it around a little bit because we figured in the last couple of weeks they had pressured the quarterbacks. Texas last week did. We prepared‑‑ what happens is when you get pressure, you change your tempo, and sometimes you want to throw it quicker. We still wanted to throw our medium routes down the field, 12, 14‑yard routes to get it to 22 down the field in crossing routes. So the offense of Chris Thomsen did a great job, and the backs blocked well. Gave our quarterback another second to hold on to it, so that guy could get deeper down the field. That was a huge difference from last week in how we played a pressure team. Q. Can you speak to the fourth down defense. Were you at all taken aback by how often they were kind of gambling? COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, it got to the point where they had to go for fourth downs. Little surprised on a couple of them. But that's the way Dana is. Last week he was 5 for 5 against Texas. We told the players defense at halftime, probably won't put a punt return team out there. They're going to go for fourth down. It was four down territory everywhere they had to score points, and we played good on fourth down. They made some third and fourth‑down conversions. But if you look at it, they're 9 of 21, somewhere around 38, 39%. You do that and you're going to win games against passing teams. We were 50%, so a huge difference. Q. (Indiscernible) status right now? COACH TUBERVILLE: Didn't look good. Non‑contact injury going down. He's a punter kickoff, and we'll evaluate it. We'll wait till tomorrow. But he's worked so hard to be good at what he's doing, and we'll just hope and pray it's not as bad as what we think. Q. What is the ceiling for this team now? COACH TUBERVILLE: I don't know. We won 5. We'd like to win them all. But we understand where we're at. We've just got to keep getting better. It's going to be tough. We've got to go on the road for two weeks now, play a couple of teams. One new one that we hadn't played which will be a big rival game for us for years, Texas Tech and TCU. Of course we have to go to Kansas State, a team that's just playing lights out the last three years. Then we come back home, and we know who we play then. So the big deal about this team and this room right here, we just try to convince them every day don't worry about tomorrow. Just worry about today. Get better. It was good today that we played a lot of people on defense. On their last drive, we played our second team defense on the last drive out there the whole time. We just didn't want to get anybody hurt. The thing about it is the guys are having fun together when you play this many people. When you play more guys on offense, more guys on defense, play a lot of subs on special teams that don't play anything else, it makes for a great locker room and makes for great practices and everybody pulls for each other. It's just a team atmosphere. Q.  Can you talk about Amaro's performance and how he's doing? COACH TUBERVILLE: That kid looked like a piece of hamburger meat a while ago. They hit him, and he hit them. He's big, he's physical, and you know, he's a big target across the middle when he runs crossing routes. But he has no fear. He got hit in the ribs and they're X‑raying him as we speak. Hopefully, it's not anything serious. He came back and played. Threw up the entire halftime. He's a football player. You can just tell his enthusiasm kind of bleeds over into the other guys. He's just a sophomore. He's kind of signifies what this whole group is about. They love playing. They understand how good they can be, if they just keep getting better. But that was a very physical game for receivers because we threw a lot of routes over the middle. When you go over the middle and catch a ball, you're going to get hammered, which we're very fortunate we hung on to most of the balls today. Q. Is there a point there where you felt like Geno Smith was affected by what you guys were doing? COACH TUBERVILLE: Going in we were going to make him throw it deep. That ball kind of fizzles in the wind on deep balls. Talking to Dana before practice‑‑ we haven't practiced in much wind. It hasn't been very windy the last couple of weeks here before practice. He said they've had a lot of wind, and that made me not feel very good that they had practiced in the wind. I was hoping it would be an advantage. But we disguised our corners a lot. We walked them up. We walked them back. We probably pressed more than what they thought they were going to do. We got on top of it and made them throw the ball deep. We were trying to keep that ball out of No. 1's hand. He's amazing. We did a pretty decent job. I think he caught a few of them. Q. Is (Indiscernible) playing any better? COACH TUBERVILLE: Who is that? Q. Your team. COACH TUBERVILLE: Oh, the team. Each week's different because you play a different type of team. Next week we'll play a running team. I haven't watched much of them a quarterback that's more of a run type of guy. This week was more of a pass. The good thing is just teaching technique you can adjust to teams that you play. You can adjust on the run in a game whether you want to try to stop the run, try to stop the pass. We can get better. Will we win any more games? I don't know. But we looked pretty good at times. We've got‑‑ the one thing I would tell you is I don't know how good we are, but we've got a lot of room for improvement which I think our guys are excited about. They know how explosive we can be, and they saw it out there today against a good team. Q. You've been part of a lot of upsets. Where does this one rank considering you were in control the whole time? COACH TUBERVILLE: Number one. Number one. No, well, they're all different. We've been struggling for an identity. We won a big game on the road. I'm going to tell you the game two weeks ago at Iowa State is right up there with this one, because we had to play our tail off. We didn't play very well. Played against a very good defensive team on the road. But I think this is good for the morale of the players and also the fans to kind of say, hey, this group's pretty good. We've got to get behind them. That is the reason I said that earlier. This is a truly a team, a city, a university win today because not a lot of people gave us a chance. They looked at us like they lost a game at home, lost to Oklahoma. Well, Oklahoma's pretty good. They're going to beat a lot of people, but so are we. Again, that's just a total team win today. Q. The first half in particular you pass the ball. Pass‑run ratio, did you feel like y'all had an advantage against their secondary, considering you had emphasized runs? COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, Neal does a good job adjusting on the run. He saw they were going to bring pressure. Once you feel like you can give your quarterback a little long tore throw it, you try to take advantage of that and get the ball down the field. That's a team that we felt like if we can just give them a little bit more time and not throw the out routes, throw more crossing routes and the ball across the middle. Again, Neal Brown called a great game today. The first half was just phenomenal. He took advantage of what they were giving us. Of course, you've got to execute, and Seth and the offensive line did a great job of that with their receivers. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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