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TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY MEDIA CONFERENCEOctober 15, 2012Tommy TubervilleCOACH TUBERVILLE: Players of the game last week, Jace Amaro on offense, Tre' Porter on defense, Olaoluwa Falemi on special teams. We gave it to the entire scout team offensive line. They did a great job last week against our defense to give them a look. Then Chris Payne, defensive scout team player of the game. Little bit about last week. Obviously this is a good win for us, a conference game. None of them are any bigger than the others. I thought maybe Iowa State froze in terms of confidence. Winning on the road, first conference game in Ames, Iowa against a very good team probably ranks a little ahead of this one other than the fact that West Virginia had played. But they all go hand in hand. Just got to learn from it, and hope you build from it. Now we get in the second half of the season, and it becomes a survival contest. We lost two players last week for the season. Bradley Marquez will be operated on this week, his knee, and then Javon Bell broke his foot. He'll have a screw put in this week, and he's done for the season. So it's one of those things that starts cropping up. Fortunately, we've got some depth at wide receiver. Jace Amaro will be questionable this week. We've got to see how he feels. He got hit in the side. He's had a tough time since the ballgame, but he did play a great game. Other than that, we're getting a little bit better. I thought that the guys competed hard, played hard, coaches had a great game plan, and it was fun to watch that day Saturday against a team that was highly ranked like West Virginia. TCU coming up. This will be a tougher game for us on the road. They're very good. They've even improved since their quarterback left. They've got more into the running mode. Quarterback has improved throwing the football in the last two weeks. They're very good on defense. This will be a rival over the years. This will be the start of a Big 12 rival here in the state. I'm sure they're looking forward to it as our players are. It should be a good one. We've got a lot of work to do working around some of those things. Trying to build spots and depth back from losing those two guys on the offense, and trying to get some guys back that are beat up a little bit and trying to get them into practice mode. It will be a tough one this week. Questions? Q. What about that ability to stretch the field? How much does that kind of hurt? COACH TUBERVILLE: Yeah, just having depth there. Just having guys to go in and rest. We played without him in practice. He did it last week in practice. All he did was make a cut. Nobody touched him, and just a small crack in the bone. When you do that in your feet, you've got to repair it. It's going to be a while before he gets back. So I don't know. There is nobody else there other than the fact of the ones we played last week. Bradley, we've moved him back and forth, played him on both sides. But we have a little depth there. We're not in panic mode, but we can't afford anything else. We're only halfway through the season, we've been pretty good to this point. But that's just part of football. Q. What is the status of Douglas? COACH TUBERVILLE: He twisted his knee. He's questionable. I don't know whether he can practice this week. We'll just have to wait and see. It's not an operable injury at all. He hurt it, and got cut on the second and third play of the game. But it's good that Bruce has played some. I hate to lose Corn in these games coming up. We might not. It just depends how he responds. Q. Would you talk about the offensive game plan, the decision to attack? Is that more of what you saw in West Virginia's defense? Is that more you felt like you need to be a little more up tempo? COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, Oklahoma got after us the week before. We really struggled on the offensive line giving Seth time to throw the ball. They forced him into plays he didn't need to get into. I thought Seth played a much smarter game. They blitzed a lot and came after us pretty much the way Oklahoma did. Our offensive line gave them protection. We blocked the blitz a little better. Seth ran the ball a little more. He's made three first downs from his runs, which helped him, which helped the team. Kept our offense on the field ask kept drives alive. So I think he's learning as we go along. But the whole thing about learning the game plan on offense is you've got to do what they give you. We pretty much thought that we were going to get what we got out of West Virginia on defense because they've done the same thing to Texas and Baylor the week before. So people usually don't change what they do. Fortunately, for us we were able to throw and catch and get the running game going to a point where we kind of kept them off balance. Q. As a coach, how do you deal with the distractions of national attention, rankings, all of these things that kind of come with success? COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, I hope we learn from last year because we pretty much around the same part of the season did the same thing. We did something nobody else thought we could do and we didn't win another game. We've got to get focused on every day of what we've got to do to get better. We're a better team than we were last year, but we're also a target. When you're ranked as high as we are now and people see what you've done, you're going to get their A‑game. So we've got to bring our A‑game every week and just continue to improve. Q. Can you shed some light if there's anything new? A couple years ago you were scheduled to play TCU and then ABC wanted you and Texas early in the year. Are the players focusing on this game anymore because of that? COACH TUBERVILLE: I don't know that the players even know anything about that. We dropped from ‑‑ is that when we dropped from four conference to three? I think it was and they wanted to move Texas up to that point. I haven't even thought about it. There's a lot of variables that will go into this game for years. I think it's good. You've got to have rival games not only for your fans and your university, but also the teams and even for television. I think this will be a natural rival over the years. TCU has done a great job. Gary Patterson has built one of the strongest programs in college football in the last ten, 12 years, so they know how to play. They know how to win games, they know how to win big games, but for us and for them it will be another Big 12 game. We'll go play, and then we'll regroup whatever happens and do the same thing, go to the next week. It makes it fun when you have a lot of interest because we know a lot of their players. They know a lot of ours. Fans know each other, and pretty much it will be that way every year. Q. Can you talk about your young offensive guards here at the midway point of the season? COACH TUBERVILLE: Really well. We started I think last week. Beau Carpenter started like 70‑something plays. He played 70‑something plays, and Alfredo played 10. Competition makes you better, and Beau Carpenter's done good. He hasn't been beat out, but Alfredo competes against him every day. Alfredo Clark played his best game, I thought, of the year. Very athletic as we know, very aggressive, played hard. He's one of those guys that gets in the trenches. He understands it's a fight every down. You've just got to fight hard and push and pull. Do everything you can to protect the quarterback and create a hole in that line of scrimmage. He's really improved in the first six games. As I talked about earlier in the year, he's got as much potential of any lineman I've ever seen. If he stays healthy and keeps his attitude, he's going to be something to watch over the next couple three years. Q.  The injuries to outside receivers, is Eric in position where can he suit up again? COACH TUBERVILLE: No, not in the future. He's still trying to get back academically. Q. (Indiscernible)? COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, we've got Zouzalik that can play every position. They've played all of them since we've been here. They're kind of the ace in the hole. They got more playing time last week because Javon went down. After ten plays, Bradley goes down. Just Bradley goes down, nobody touched him. He was just recovering a punt, and he tried to stop. But it's not an ACL which is good. It's other small damage in there that they're going to have to repair and it's going to keep him out. It won't be as long of recovery for Bradley. Q. You've had a lot of depth at receiver. So can you see any drop off now that Bradley's gone and Javon's gone, and maybe‑‑ COACH TUBERVILLE: Yeah, there will be a dropoff just for the fact that we won't get as much practice time. We won't be as fresh. Guys are going to make more plays than in the past. For instance, our three running backs last week got 25 to 30 plays. One of them goes down, and one is going to play 40 and the other one's going to have to play 40. That's the wear and tear of the season. We run so many routes in practice, we run so many routes in games and we block and do all those things. Then all of a sudden you lose a couple guys and it kind of puts you in a tail spin, but we'll be fine. As everybody does this time of year, you've got to replace. This time last year we didn't have the depth. This year we've got some depth, but we're going to start running out of it. You can't keep having that kind of luck as you go. Q. You said that Jace is questionable. If he doesn't play, who will be your tight end? COACH TUBERVILLE: We've got Cameron Wright. He played some last week. Jace played the whole game. He got hurt and came out. We just want to get him a hundred percent healthy. It's one of those things where he's a big time football player. As we all saw last week, he's hard to tackle. It's a lot easier to throw to a guy that's 6'6" than a guy that's 5'6". He's a little bigger target. Q. (Indiscernible)? COACH TUBERVILLE: He was in there this morning. Q. Jace was still in the hospital this morning from Saturday night? COACH TUBERVILLE: I think Sunday, yeah. They just put him in there to make sure he gets observation. Even when I went out there on the field, he wasn't in good shape. When you get hit in the stomach, and he was pretty rough. He hadn't broken anything. Q. Breaks? COACH TUBERVILLE: No, there are no breaks. He just got mashed. One of those type of deals. So he's pretty beat up. Q. Could you talk about the squib kick as opposed to kicking down field? Was that a function of the wind? COACH TUBERVILLE: Yeah. I kicked the one, one time, and I said I wasn't going to do it. We almost regretted it. The sucker almost ran it back on us. I really was going to kick it to them into the wind. It wasn't that bad. It's just the problem is when you kick into the wind, you know they're going to have a return and the ball balloons on you and gets high. You don't know where it's going to blow. I didn't want it to blow in his direction. We just kind of took our medicine. We didn't have very good kicks into the wind. Might as well on‑side it. It just didn't go anywhere. That's just part of trying to execute something that you don't do very often. Q. Going back to TCU, does it make an impact? COACH TUBERVILLE: I think they look at offenses and defenses. We're pretty much different on offenses. We're more of a spread‑throw. We're a little more pro‑style attack and threw the ball, and they're still throwing it now. But they're more on the spread‑run, throw‑play action, those type of things. You don't go off of that. You lose four or five in a row, and it makes a difference. But one game's not going to make a difference. Q. Speaking of recruiting, you have three straight games on ABC and kind of an early afternoon slot. How good is that? COACH TUBERVILLE: It's helpful. National exposure helps. I think that we're in the business of sales. If you don't sell what you're doing, you also want to sell the way we sold Saturday. People see something positive, and it can be on where you don't have a lot of positives like the week before. But as long as you're on there and you make a good showing, it obviously helps recruiting. Q. Is the defense getting better? COACH TUBERVILLE: Yeah, they're getting better. We've seen it. The good thing that I've seen is we've adjusted. We've seen throwing teams, we've seen running teams, spread‑run, pro‑style run. They are better. I think that not just 11 of them, but 20 to 25 guys are better which has helped us. If you notice out there, you don't see 11 starters after the first series, you don't see those 11 guys out there at the same time in the rest of the game. You're going to see a couple of D‑linemen in there. The backups are in there and the linebackers move in and out. The only place that we pretty much stay the same is secondary because of the experience that we have in that group. Yeah, we've improved. I think our tackling has improved. Our technique is much better. We didn't play the best game against the run that we played. That was a little disappointing. They ran the ball on us more than we would have hoped. But they're a pretty good running team. You always have to give the other team a little credit. You can't be perfect all the time, and they did a good job. Once we got the lead, we were hoping they'd run it. We were starting to do some things that were forcing the quarterback to go to a run read than a pass read to try to run that clock. Q. What made you proud of the guys and the way you played as a team this week? What's going to happen this week in practice and more or less in the locker room as far as what are you going to be talking about to keep the guys seeing better results? COACH TUBERVILLE: Just talking about us. We didn't hardly talk about Oklahoma or Iowa State or about West Virginia. We talked about us playing our game. Control what we can control. Get better. Everybody working to get better. Really pump the scout teams up because this time of year the only way you're going to get better is if your scout teams are efficient and make you better in terms of an 18‑year‑old offensive lineman blocking a 22‑year‑old defensive lineman. Sometimes they're a little bit shocked by having to block an older guy like that. But our scout teams have done well for us. They've given us some good looks. They've helped make our guys better in terms of technique. They've made us play hard, and they've taken pride in it. They get out there every day and really come at us, which five weeks from this Saturday, it's over. So we, as we go along, will quit doing as much against ourselves and just do more scout team work to where we can keep everybody healthy. But scout team has been a big, big help for us this year. Q. What have you seen from Coach Kaufman that's allowed the defensive unit improve so much this year? COACH TUBERVILLE: Art's got a lot more patience than I've got. I sat there and listened and I gave my input. He can stick with something. Lot of times people panic and think we've got to change this because they made a few yards on this or that. Art's one of those guys that kind of understands what he wants out of every call. He's not going to try to outcoach anybody. He's going to get our guy and let him play. That's where we need to be right now. We're not to the point where we can change everything around each week to say, listen, in this formation, if we can run this defense, it will make us better. I would like to do that some sometimes. But he said, Coach, we can't do that. We're not to that point yet. So he's been good for me. Just saying, Hey, let's be patient and keep doing what we're doing. Knowing that we're not going to hold West Virginia to 200 yards. If they get 400 yards, then we've got a chance to still have success. That's the great thing about Art and all the defensive coaches. They've done a good job of just sticking to what they believe is the right thing to do, even though they know that they're going to give up some points and some yards. Q. Do you think there is any extra motivation for this defense in particular going up against Coach Glasgow this week? COACH TUBERVILLE: No, not really. There won't even be any talk about it all week long. It's different team, different year. Q. What do you feel from that atmosphere there having not play there had? COACH TUBERVILLE: I've never been there before. I'm anxious to go. I've seen it on film. The stadium looks nice. They've really done a good job with it. I talked to Gary last year at a golf tournament about it. They're really pumped up about the expansion and all the new things that they've done. So we're excited they're in the conference. They're a closer team to us. There wasn't a team in the Dallas area in the Big 12. Gives us an opportunity to go there every other year once more. Even though we're taking one of the other games to that area, I think it's natural that both teams get into it every year, both fans get into it. I probably wish it was a little earlier in the season to have that game earlier in the season or at the end to where you've got that natural rival look, but we have no control over that. Q. Talk about what you said to (Indiscernible)? COACH TUBERVILLE: Put both hands on the ball. When you're 35‑7 and we're driving down‑‑ we knew once we got one more touchdown, we were getting ready to let the air out of it. That clock just couldn't go fast enough, because those guys on the other side score a lot of points. He worked hard to get it down there, and the guy made a great play. He had it in his left hand, and the guy put his helmet right on the football. That's what you teach. They made a great play, and unfortunately for him, he got a little wrath when he got to the sideline. But he's fine. He understands. You get to the 10‑yard line, you know they're going to be going for the ball. You have to understand that. Open field. Probably a little bit more free with what you do. But around that goal line, they're going to be going after it. Again, you've got to remember now, he hadn't played a lot of football. He'll learn from every experience. Q. (Indiscernible)? COACH TUBERVILLE: Did a great job on number one. He covered number one most of the game. He gave up one play over 20 yards, and that was the play down the middle. We were in the zone. Our safety didn't get over enough. We were trying to disguise it. He was on the other side of the field and he forgot how fast that guy was. We didn't divert him. If you don't knock him off his path and he gets one shot, we didn't have anybody out there that could get over that far. D.J. almost made it. But we tried to get the best of both worlds. Other than that Porter did a great job covering him. We challenged him all week. It wasn't that it was on him every snap, but pretty much. I thought he did a great job. Q. Coach, is that the greatest feeling in the world, the Gatorade shower? I know at the time you were cold. But is that the greatest thing as a coach? COACH TUBERVILLE: I've had a few of those, and there is not anything great about the moment. Now afterwards it feels good, but I've been hit in the head with those things dropped on me and all that. At least they didn't drop the bucket and hit me in the head. It's always satisfying. That was a big win for our program for the moment. Hopefully, there will be more of those in the future. I could have done without that to be honest with you. Q. What do you teach special teams to run to the line or kickoff? What's that teach them? COACH TUBERVILLE: You're talking about all ten running through? Well, we just wanted ‑‑ it's a little bit of intimidation on both sides. Guys feeling good about running down. Most of the time now the ball will be kicked into the end zone. He's talking about your kickoff team. If the balls are down, they all run to the goal line. Sometimes they do, sometimes we don't. We really grade them on that as we look at the film on Sundays. A lot of guys are at the point to getting ready to go back on defense. But it's just a fact that we're trying to stress playing a hundred percent. One more thing. Today or yesterday Daniel Cobb was added back to our football team, hundred percent. I know he spent the last two and a half months trying to clear his name from a bad situation. When you do something like that and you're accused of something, my policy is to make sure that everything's above board and that they have to clear their name. He's done it all on his own. He's been cleared by the district attorney. No wrongdoing whatsoever. He's had to clear his name. The kid's going to graduate in two months and three and a half years in business. Never gave us one bit of problem. But it cost him two and a half months of playing college football and six games. I'm proud of what he stood for. He's worked hard to clear his name. He's been cleared a hundred percent. He was talked about quite a bit now by the media when he was accused. So I need your help to help clear his name tomorrow. There are no charges. There was nothing ever done. He was a hundred percent innocent, and we're glad to have him back on the team because that's pretty tough on a kid that age that had never done anything wrong in his life in terms of crossing the line and then accused of a felony. Then having to go through that himself, I mean, that's a growing‑up process. I can't imagine having to do that. So we're glad to have him back. He's back a hundred percent member of the team and will play this week. So we're looking forward to Daniel being part of it, and we're glad everything worked out. On behalf of him and his family, we need your help to make sure people understand that he has not done anything wrong, and he worked hard to get his name a hundred percent cleared. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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