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

December 28, 2015

Ty Darlington

Miami Gardens, Florida

Q. He wants everyone to believe he's not fast, and the last three games --
TY DARLINGTON: He doesn't get caught. That's the thing. I was talking about that with somebody recently. He doesn't get caught, and that's -- you can say thunder and lightning with Mixon, but not really because Joe is too big to be lightning. He's like 220 pounds, and Samaje might be too fast to just be thunder.

Q. If you're a DB and you want to try and chase him down --
TY DARLINGTON: Oh, yeah. It's formidable size and strength.

Q. Coach Venables said there's not a whole lot of value in watching the film of last year's game, but Samaje said there is motivation, value for you in terms of motivation. Would you agree with that?
TY DARLINGTON: Yeah, you can't lie and say it's not on our minds, at least some measure. Teams are very different. On both sides of the ball there's a lot of personnel changes. In our case there was a complete system change. And what they're doing defensively, they didn't do a lot of it -- what they did last year is completely different from what they're doing now on defense. In that way there's not a whole lot. At the same time you go back and watch that TV copy and listen to the commentary and watch the game, and yeah, not wanting to see or do anything like that for a while.

Q. Baker said he thought it was disrespectful, the commentary.
TY DARLINGTON: I hadn't seen it until recently. I mean, I'm not going to say it was uncalled for because we very much deserved a lot of it, but it was pretty critical. I was surprised. I don't know if I've ever heard it.

Q. What did they say?
TY DARLINGTON: I'm not going to put that out there.

Q. It's already out there, though.
TY DARLINGTON: Some of the stuff, just some of the stuff about comparing us to them and just kind of --

Q. Y'all didn't deserve to be on the same field with them?
TY DARLINGTON: Um --

Q. Do the coaches bring it up?
TY DARLINGTON: It's there to watch if you want to watch it.

Q. Speaking of unpleasant memories that you probably don't want to talk about, what changed for you guys after Texas?
TY DARLINGTON: Just a complete like mentality switch, I think. It was a look in the mirror moment, where it was like, how serious are we about conference play because somebody asked me over there if I thought that we would be here, and this is where we planned to be all along, right here, in this stage, in this playoff game to go to the big game. That's where we planned to be since the day after Clemson last year. That was a moment we had to look at ourselves and realize, okay, we've got to do something different because that was not championship-level football. And even before that point, we had played -- we had won, but we had not played like we play now.

Q. The Tulsa game?
TY DARLINGTON: Yeah, Tulsa scored a lot of points on us. Tennessee was ugly. We played terrible at Tennessee. All in all, that Tennessee game, we really played pretty poorly. And even like Akron, didn't play very clean in the Akron game. Until after that Texas game, that's where we really saw it, and you saw us play with like energy that we had never played with before after that game. That Kansas State game, the next one, we could've played (inaudible) it wouldn't have mattered. We really came out swinging, and every game since then. It didn't matter if we were playing in Lawrence, Kansas, or playing in Waco, a big-time atmosphere. The energy from the team from there on out, the energy and the focus throughout the week and on game day, second to none.

Q. How did the offense go from getting six sacks at Texas -- I know that's not necessarily you guys' fault, to just dominating the line of scrimmage like you are now?
TY DARLINGTON: I think we've taken ownership a lot. After that Texas game, it wasn't just successful with 70 yards rushing or just something absolutely abysmal, that is not what we're accustomed to. We're talking about dominating games. We're not talking about finishing midway in the conference and this and that. We want to give up the least sacks and rush for the most yards in the conference, and that's the goal from the start. That wasn't the way we were performing. I think after that Texas game, everybody individually, individually each man looked in the mirror and said, what am I going to do to change it, because it's got to be personal, and I think they had to sort of take it personal. I as an individual and us as a group are letting down the rest of the team because we're not performing to the standard that we're capable of.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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