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TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY MEDIA CONFERENCENovember 19, 2012Tommy TubervilleCOACH TUBERVILLE: All right, Baylor Bears. Seems like just yesterday we went there and played and we're looking forward to going back. Seems like our annual Thanksgiving Day game. I'm not sure if it will be this day next year, pretty sure it won't be. But I think it's fun for our teams and a lot of fans in Dallas‑Fort Worth. Gives everybody a chance to have Thanksgiving and do something a little different. So our guys, especially the guys that haven't been there before are looking forward to going and going to the stadium. Baylor, another good, very good offensive team. They might be the most balanced in the league. I think they're the second best offense in the country. Nick Florence has picked up, really picked up during our game last year where Robert Griffin kind of turned it over to him in our game in the second half. He played very well then, so we're very familiar with him. He threw I think a couple touchdown passes and played well. They've got a good running game to go along with this year with their passing game. They've got very good receivers. They've got good offensive linemen. They've turned into a physical team that also can throw the ball on the perimeter and threw it deep. Good play‑action game. Our defense has their hands full. They did a good job of spreading the field and using their receivers. Defensively they took a lot of lumps in the season but have gotten much better over the last three, four weeks. Everybody talks about defenses in this league, and oh, this team doesn't have a good one, this team doesn't have a good one, and you've got to look at who they're playing against, the good offenses. You give up 450 yards on defense, and that's usually a pretty good day in this league. So watching their game from last week, that's a monumental task of beating the No. 1 team in the country. And they've had a game like that last year against Oklahoma. They weren't number one, but pretty much this time of year and then, of course, playing Kansas State last week, so that's a huge win for Baylor. They've got a lot of good athletes. They do a good job of using their athletes, and we're looking forward to giving it another shot. We've got a lot of work to do to make some movements and changes with our lineup. We won't go through all the injuries, but we do have some. I think everybody knows that. We're not near the team we were five or six weeks ago because of injury. But we've got a lot of guys playing hard. We've got a chance to hopefully put together a game this week that's much better than the ones we've played in the last few weeks. Questions? Q. (Indiscernible)? COACH TUBERVILLE: I don't even know yet. They come in for treatment today. They came in this morning. Not a lot of change from Saturday on most of them. Hopefully we can get somebody back at the end of the week, but right now it doesn't look very good. Q. Can you talk about their running game? COACH TUBERVILLE: Yeah, transferred from Oregon. He can run. He's not the biggest guy you'll see. He's not as big as the guy we saw last week, but he can run. He's quick, he's mobile, they throw the ball to him, and you can tell he's gotten stronger being his first year, better as the year has gone on. He's very patient. I think the ability of the running quarterback also helps him and gives him a chance to get in open field and take a guy out of the box when they've got to take the quarterback on the option reads and those things. But he's had a very good first year. He's got a lot of talent I remember from high school. He's a talented quick guy that's going to make a lot of plays for Baylor next year. Q. What is the mindset of your team right now coming off this game? COACH TUBERVILLE: Oh, it's obviously to the point where it's been a long year. We haven't had a lot of good things go our way the last four or five weeks. They've been real patient. They've practiced well last week. Like we said, they've had good practices and the guys got effort. Obviously it didn't show up in the game on Saturday, but that's all you can ask for. Again, we've made some changes last week going into that game. We'll have to make several more this week going in with guys playing in different positions. So it's going to be a good three days of practice. Fortunately we've got a little more time because of Thanksgiving. We can watch film, have a few more walkthroughs and hopefully get some guys ready that haven't played a whole lot going into this game on Saturday just because of the time restraints. We think it will give us a little better time for preparation, but still the ballgame is five days away and one hour. So we've got a lot of work to do when we start practice tomorrow. Q. (Indiscernible)? COACH TUBERVILLE: Yeah, we had a lot last week, and we'll have to have more this week. We had Chris Payne still not ready to go this week. He's got some kind of illness or virus, whatever. Mackey didn't go last week.  He's a little of our depth, but he's not special teams. Chris Payne has a concussion, he's out until the Bowl game. We're trying to find guys now that can give the starters relief. We'll play a lot of starters on special teams this week because it's the last game and they want to do that. But, again, it's hard to do everything on special teams and turn around and do everything on offense or defense. But we've got some pretty special kids that want to do that. Q. Talking about special teams after the second blocked punt in the game already at hand, at that point as a coach, were you upset? Were you rushing the punter? COACH TUBERVILLE: Oh, no, they did a good job. They took advantage of two new guys that we've got on our field. And their special teams coach was my special teams guy last year. So he knew who we have and what we do. We just didn't execute very well. We probably should have done a few things a little differently in terms of that. But you do whatever you can to win games. I've never worried about anybody doing anything that they coached our players to do and try to execute. Q. How difficult is it to overcome the turnovers when they're in your territory and you set them up with a short field? COACH TUBERVILLE: Yeah, I don't think we've had a turnover since the TCU game. I haven't looked at it. But we tend to can't get any, but we tend to turn them over. That was a week last week that I thought they were going to go our way, because it's just a matter of time. As hard as our guys play and as hard as they've worked at it. But, again, you can't wish for that to happen, you have to make it happen. As I told our players, things happen for a reason because you're at the right place at the right time. Maybe get a hand in or whatever. But we're living for a short field. Our offense, and Doege's had a tough time all throughout the year. We've not given him an opportunity to drive 15, 20 yards and score touchdowns. That just hasn't happened. Everything that we do, we've had to earn. We've done a pretty good job of it at times of driving the ball and being consistent. You play some of these teams that are very good on the other side, it's just hard to overcome that. Q. It seems in a couple of times this year you've played really well in the first quarter or first half, and then something happens and it get as way from you. Do you see a common thread in those? COACH TUBERVILLE: We go back every week, and the first four minutes of the second quarter last week was disastrous. Obviously, turnovers and blocked punt. You don't work for those to happen. Again, the other team over there has an opportunity to make things happen themselves. They did a good job. We probably tried to force some things. We tried to ask Seth to do a little bit more on one of those interceptions than probably we should have of handing the ball off and punting. Still trying to get 10 or 12 yards for a first down. But, again, we're in to win the game, and our players know that. They've responded before, and hopefully we'll bounce back, do it again this week and respond. Q. Terrance Williams is obviously one of the most explosive receivers in the country. What sort of challenges does he present? COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, he's as good as we've seen. They do a good job with him. They move him inside receiver, outside receiver, so you don't know where he's going to be at. Then they put him in motion. Their running game, I think the improvement that they've made in the running game as their play action off of it and throwing the ball, post route, short slants and things, they do everything they can to get to them. The kid reminds me of Blackmon. He's a lot like him. I don't know the speed of either one of them. But he plays the ball well in the air. Main coverage is not going to be to answer every down. Obviously, you have to do it a little bit. But he's one of those that he out jumps DBs. He looks identical to what Blackmon looked like for my first year here just watching him run around and make plays. He's very physical. Again, the quarterback is very able to get the ball to him. The quarterback might be playing the best of anybody in the league right now. I know we have a guy that's a Heisman Trophy guy and probably still is. But this kid throws it well on the money and he runs the ball. That's what gives him the opportunity to be a dual‑threat of running and throwing on the run. They do a lot of things out of the pocket where they do two and three‑man routes out of the pocket read and throwing on the run, which is hard to do for most quarterbacks. He does a very good job of it. Q. You have two safeties (Indiscernible) right now. COACH TUBERVILLE: Yeah, they got us last week, play action. We've got to find some way to stop the run. Again, we played man coverage on the outside, as we talked about the other day. Tried to match up and keep involving those guys in the run. But sooner or later, you go to the well too much. But Cody and D.J. played well. I don't know, we probably ranked somewhere in the top 30 or 40 on defense nationally in the country. And because of those guys, they tackle well. They've been around the ball. They make plays. Cody would love to have that interception the other night. He broke on it well, saw it, and made the break on it. But those two guys have been the driving force of our improvement on defense. Again, sometimes it doesn't look like we've improved, but you look at everybody's defense in the league, and you're going to give up a lot of yards. The only thing those two kids, and we've talked about it, they create more turnovers, tackles, or making plays on the ball. They got a couple behind us the other night coming to the line of scrimmage and making tackles. Q. What is your thought of how Michael Brewer has progressed? COACH TUBERVILLE: He looked well. The thing you look at is reads. You don't just look at drop back. Does he complete the ball? Does he do it in the sequence he's supposed to be doing it? Because that's how you play quarterback. You're going to have to, once you start playing against starting defenses, he was going against a back‑up defense. But he made a good throw for the touchdown. He had one that he didn't go all the way through his reads, but other than that, he was cool, he was calm, and we'd have loved to be able to get him in the game in the year, but we haven't been able to. We made a few games the last few weeks just to get him out there to run the ball and see what he can do with that. But he looked the heir apparent, and he's going to be‑‑ it's going to be a project for him early because he doesn't know near what Seth does. But that's what starting quarterbacks are about. Q. Coach, offensively a couple weeks ago you played a pass game. Why so many running plays on third and long? Third and 15, third and 20? COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, third and 15 or 20, I'll pass that over to y'all and let y'all call those plays. Those are hard. What happens is we've gone back and we tend to turn the ball over a little more than we should on those situations because they're dropping eight. They're not going to let you throw it in there. You've got to be dang near perfect. We've been trying to play a little field position. There are times like the other day where we did try to get the ball in on 3rd and 12. They dropped 8. Seth did exactly what we asked him to do, he just wasn't able to thread the needle. Lot of times you've got to take your medicine and run it, try to get some yards back and punt the ball down the field and play defense. You can't try to put everything on the quarterback on every snap. Q. What is your strategy with 14 or 21, are you still trying to play field position? COACH TUBERVILLE: In that situation, I don't know if you saw our lineup on the offensive line, we were having a tough time protecting Seth. We didn't want to continue to turn guys loose. We had one guy playing his normal position at the beginning. We actually moved Gallington out. That was Kaster that made the bad snap. We're trying to find some combination of going into this week where we could play and get guys in positions where they could help us win this game coming up so, we put him in there. But most of the second half, only Gallington was playing the position that we started the game out in. We had to flip Beau Carpenter over. Ray to the outside, Terry McDaniel to the other side, and played Alfredo Morales who eventually got hurt, and we had to put Polk in the game. So we got to that point of throwing for 3rd and 25. All you're going to do is it is get your quarterback hurt in that situation. Q. (Indiscernible)? COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, I mean, we've just got to coach them up. We haven't decided which combination. We got decided on the center, who is going to play center first, where Gallington will be best at. Is Kaster best at center? What our best combination is at the guard position. Terry McDaniel will go to the other side. He played pretty good. Hadn't played there, but he's practiced there quite a bit. Le'Raven, do we need to have him at guard, or do we need to have him at tackle? Do we put Gallington on the outside? We've got five days to figure out a combination to protect and be able to throw, because we've got to be able to throw the ball this week. We all know that to have a chance. But the number one thing is I don't want the quarterback on his back every time he throws it. So we have to find the best combination among those guys and that will start tomorrow. Q. (Indiscernible)? COACH TUBERVILLE: Kaster has been pretty good. Just hadn't had a chance to play enough. There was one game he had to go in, might have been the Texas game where he had to go in, and he might have scored after Gallington has turned his ankle. He'll be fine. He's got to get stronger. He'll gain 10 to 12 pounds between now and next year and get stronger. You know, Fortenberry hurt his back. He'll be our starting left tackle next year, but he's not ready to go. That is a situation we got put in at left tackle. So we were in pretty good shape until he hurt his back about three weeks ago. Now that is the reason we're in this jam that we're in trying to get guys in the right position and moving guys around. Q. Is Tony Morales ready? COACH TUBERVILLE: Yeah, Tony's ready. We've already talked to him. He'll play center and guard. Just depending on what we do with Gallington and what position we put him in. Tony has been a right guard and a center. He's worked every day for about a month, but his brother won't be able to play. He's pretty much out. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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