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COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYOFF SEMIFINAL AT THE CAPITAL ONE ORANGE BOWL: CLEMSON VS OKLAHOMA

December 27, 2015

Ahmad Thomas

Miami Gardens, Florida

Q. Talk about playing in this type of game.
AHMAD THOMAS: It's nothing new to me. I've played big games all my life. Ever since I was in Little League I played semifinals, Super Bowl games, and now I played state games, and I'm back in the Orange Bowl. Like me being from Miami, that's a dream, because you know, everybody from Miami wants to play in the Orange Bowl game. I just want to make the best of it and come out with a win.

Q. What's the demand been like from your family or friends for tickets or time?
AHMAD THOMAS: Man, like I told the interviewers back in Oklahoma, I woke up, because we didn't know what bowl game we was playing in, I woke up and I had 120 messages from people I never even heard of, from friends I didn't even know I had. I need two tickets, I need three tickets. I'm like, oh, man. It's kind of frustrating, but I'm looking for tickets for people that I know and people that matter.

Q. How many did you wind up getting?
AHMAD THOMAS: 16 right now. I've got more coming, but --

Q. From your teammates?
AHMAD THOMAS: Yeah, I need at least 40, for all my cousins and all my friends and all my ex-teammates out at college that are going to come down. I show some love to them, because like one of my friends plays for Purdue and another one plays for Syracuse, but all my other friends play for Florida State, Florida, stuff like that. When I come down they're not here because they've got bowl games, too, so I just show love to people that need it.

Q. You talked about playing in big games before. Besides this, what's the biggest game you've played in?
AHMAD THOMAS: Ooh, every year, OU-Texas, OU vs. OSU. Man, those are huge games. And I didn't even know nothing about those games because I'm a Miami kid, so I never really knew about OU like that until my mama wanted me to leave out of Miami. We didn't know these games are huge, man.

And then we played Tennessee at their place, and there was 110,000. I've played a lot of big games. And my freshman year we played Alabama in the Sugar Bowl. It's big games and opportunities are out there for everybody to get seen. I've played in a lot of big games as soon as I got in college, and before I went in college.

Q. What about in Miami?
AHMAD THOMAS: In college or?

Q. In high school or before.
AHMAD THOMAS: In high school, ever since my team in high school, I went to state in 10th grade, 11th grade, 12th grade, and those were all big games and I played a role in all of those games. I know how it feels to win and I know how it feels to lose. So when I got to college and we won the Big 12 and we won the Sugar Bowl, I knew how it felt to win, so I knew what it really took to win, too.

Q. Have you ever played a game in this stadium?
AHMAD THOMAS: Yeah, in high school I played Booker T and I played Northwestern.

Q. Did you win?
AHMAD THOMAS: We won, yeah.

Q. Is that a pretty cool experience playing in a big stadium like that at the time?
AHMAD THOMAS: Yeah, it is, and it's so ironic because when we played Clemson last year, every year we played our state game in high school there. Ever year we played our state game there.

Q. Have you talked to your ex-coaches at Central?
AHMAD THOMAS: Yeah, every time I come home I talk to my coaches. Even when I'm not home I talk to my coaches because they're the reason I'm at where I'm at.

Q. Tell us about the journey, going from here to now two, three years later, what it's taken to get to this point for you, what that was like for you?
AHMAD THOMAS: I had to be wise, because you know, Miami, there's a lot of things you can get into, a lot of wrong decisions you can make. I'm not saying I made all the right decisions because I didn't, but I made good decisions more than I made bad decisions. I listened to people. People thought I wasn't listening to them, but I was. But when you're young, you want to do what you want to do, and I did what I had to do to get out of here because if I didn't really want to play football I could have been in the streets. A lot of my friends didn't play football. I built a lot of friendships and then I started surrounding myself with the right people, and I started listening to them. I started listening to my mama. I started listening to my coaches. I started listening to everybody that wanted the best for me. I started listening to everybody that wanted the best for me, and it turned out to be good. It's real hard to raise a kid in Miami because you've got drug dealers on the corner from your house, you've got people robbing people, you've got kids -- my cousin's husband's friend just got killed in front of his kids. I was seeing that on Facebook. All my friends in elementary school and middle school got killed, and I see that on Facebook when I'm up at Oklahoma, and I'm thinking, I'm looking at that like, I'm glad I left, because I could have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. I couldn't have been doing that in the streets or none of that. I could have been in that wrong place at the wrong time and gotten killed, so that why I'm glad that I left. I'm glad that I met the people that I met when I left, and it's just crazy. It's crazy for everybody in Miami because you never know what's going to happen.

Q. Did you always feel like you wanted to go far away when you were picking a college?
AHMAD THOMAS: I mean, yeah. When I started listening to my mom, when I started listening to my coaches, I started thinking because I was being called by so many colleges, and I just had to -- I needed that time to myself to think, and then when I talked to Coach Stoops, I was talking to them for almost a week straight, and that was on top of other colleges, so when I had my downtime when I would think, I was like, man, I need to make up my mind before it's too late.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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