|
|||
|
|||
|
 |
|
|
MOTEL 6 CACTUS BOWL: WEST VIRGINIA VS ARIZONA STATEJanuary 1, 2016Todd GrahamDana HolgorsenPhoenix, Arizona THE MODERATOR: Good morning, everyone. Happy New Year. Thank you for joining us for today's press conference. We'll go straight ahead into media questions. Q. With such a long layoff, what is your biggest concern going into this game? COACH HOLGORSEN: There's always probably the biggest thing is overall speed of the game. You practice with each other as much as you possibly can, try to keep the speed of the game. Then you always run into the element of guys getting tired of practicing against each other and want to go play somebody else. You run into that in camp. You run into that in spring practice. You run into it in the bowl preparation as well. I guess it's just the speed of the game. COACH GRAHAM: Well, I mean, my biggest concern, their explosiveness is what I would be concerned about. But it's exciting to play a great opponent. I really don't sit around worrying about concerns. We're working really hard to get prepared for a good team. We've had such a great experience this week, everything has been first class. Probably the biggest concern is wanting our seniors to play well. You want them to go out and perform well, have a great day. That's the big thing. Most of the things I'm worried about is defending them, trying to be successful. Q. For both coaches, again, familiarity with systems. There are a lot of changes. Are there similarities from what you've seen in past meetings? You obviously face each other often and have changed schemes. Are there familiarities from what each of you have done in the past? COACH HOLGORSEN: I think evolved. I think the only one in the country that hasn't evolved is Mike Leach. He's been doing the same thing over and over again. Coach Graham defensively is known across the country as one of the better ones out there. He's evolved into taking a few more risks, I think, just based on the amount of times they blitz and put pressure on you. Seems every single down they're putting pressure on you. We've evolved offensively, I think, to the point to where we're utilizing our better players a little bit more than we have in the past. It just happens to be tight ends and fullbacks and stuff like that. It's just coaching. You find out what your guys do, what you're comfortable with, what you feel good about calling. If it works, you probably want to keep calling it. It's one of the fun things about doing what we do is being able to do different things, experiment with things, figuring out what you do well. COACH GRAHAM: I would agree with coach. I think if you don't evolve, you die. Obviously every year I focus more, I'm sure coach is the same way, on what you got to do to try to win your league. You adapt really to that. I think watching the Big 12, it reminds me a lot of the PAC-12. I mean, both leagues are very difficult to play defense in. I mean, it is very, very difficult. A lot of explosive offenses. We definitely are a lot different than we used to be. It's just adapting to what we're trying to figure out ways to win games. I think they're the same way. You adapt to your players, to their skills and talents, try to figure out a way to win games. Definitely I would look at both of our systems and say we've evolved quite a bit. Like coach said, I think that's a fun part of the game. But you have to do that. If you don't, it makes it difficult to be successful. Q. Dana, you said you got the majority of the work done in Morgantown. How do you guard against peaking too soon? COACH HOLGORSEN: Don't practice, I guess. The trick is once the season's over, we played all the way up until that first week in December, that's a long season. You got to give these guys a little bit of time off. After the season is over, you got to get them healed up, rested up. You got to keep timing. I think it's overstated a little bit that you can turn it into a spring practice and practice your young guys. I think that's a little bit exaggerated. Then you got to get a good week of practice in. So I think everybody does probably about the same thing. They get about two weeks of practice for your opponent as opposed to one throughout the season. Probably more like a bye week than it is anything. You got a week of finals that you've got to deal with, as well. I've never peaked out too early. I've not had the guys prepared to play before, but I've never had them peaked out too early. COACH GRAHAM: I agree. The whole process is getting your guys healed up. The season is so grueling. It's very difficult. I think people don't realize how difficult it is to be a student-athlete. The time especially they spend to be successful academically, as well as the time it takes to compete at this level. Then the physicality, how hard it is on their bodies. We have pretty much the same schedule. It's all about, to me, getting your guys ready, each person, how bad do you want to do it, how bad do you want it. One thing I've done my whole career, I always walk around before the game. I couldn't wait to be a head coach, thought I was going to be in control of everything. You get to be head coach, you don't have control over anything at all. Are they ready? Are they ready? Half the time our strength coach says they're ready, then we have our worst game. It's such an emotional thing. The key to being successful is consistently being ready to play and loving this game and recruiting kids and coaching kids to play with a great deal of passion. I never, ever think about whether we're peaking or not peaking. Our schedule is about the same. I think we had about 14 days' practice, spent about two weeks getting ready. Q. Dana, do you see the same scenarios between the two conferences? COACH HOLGORSEN: Well, we both play nine conference games. That's more than a couple of the other conferences play. That probably means maybe a little bit more competitive football games. This is the first PAC-12 team that we've played - I don't remember the last time West Virginia played a PAC-12 game. First one in about five years, since Coach Graham has been here, that I've been able to study the PAC-12. It's changed considerably. When we were at Oklahoma State, we played Arizona in the Alamo Bowl. You could look at the PAC-12 games, and it was a different conference. It was more tight ends, fullbacks, traditional pro-style offense, old West-Coast-style offense. Five years later, being able to study the PAC-12 now, largely because Coach Graham comes in, Coach Rodriguez comes in, a lot of the coaching changes have made it more wide open, up-tempo. What you really think of Oregon, kind of up and down the West Coast, the PAC-12. It's changed considerably. It's very similar to what the Big 12 is. Why one got left out? I don't know. Just because it's so competitive. Every game you study with these guys is as competitive as heck. It's very similar to the Big 12 because of the competition. I wish everybody would play nine conference games. I think it would be fair. Q. Todd, you were known as a defensive guy, Dana, offensive. Was it difficult to learn the other side? COACH GRAHAM: I was very fortunate. I started off being a head coach, high school head coach. We coached both sides of the ball. You coached everything. So I kind of learned growing up that way. You have to have a belief in what you believe in. I don't just hire an offensive coordinator and say, Run whatever you want to run. I have a belief in it myself. Then I've learned over the years how to do that. I think sometimes I would watch and see a lot of defensive-minded coaches tend to jerk their quarterback out every five minutes, then fire their offensive coordinator all the time. I've never fired one. I pretty much try to give them the latitude that I want as a defensive play-caller. You just do the things that you do well. When I first got to be a head coach, everybody would tell you, You need to be a CEO, you need to do all this stuff. I think it's different for everybody. Heck, I coached the corners. But I'm still involved in everything that we do. I think I learned that you got to believe, it's an overall program what you believe in. I've been a no-huddle guy from the time I was a head coach, that's 1994, something like that, in high school. I've had a philosophy of what we believe in. The no-huddle is about physicality. It is difficult. I think it's completely changed the game. So it hasn't been difficult for me. I think it's difficult at this level. When you get at this level where we're at, the difference between winning and losing is very, very small. It's just getting the right guys and then keeping 'em. That's the challenge. I don't know if that answers your question, but that's what I would say. COACH HOLGORSEN: Coach is a defensive guy. He's been pretty damn good on offense for a long time. When that happens, you lose those coaches. That's a good thing, not a bad thing. I think my philosophy is a little bit different defensively. I tried to piece it together and failed. I think you got to get a guy, in my opinion, on defense and you just got to trust him to do his job. That's what we've done with Coach Gibson. He's got something that's unique that goes back with a lot of the same background as Coach Graham, back in the West Virginia days. He has something he believes in and that's what he's going to do. If you're comfortable with it, you know how to call it, make adjustments to it, you know how to recruit to it, then that's probably your best chance to be successful. It's tough in today's day and time. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
About ASAP Sports •
FastScripts Archive •
Recent Interviews •
Captioning •
Upcoming Events •
Contact Us
FastScripts | Events Covered | Our Clients | Other Services | ASAP in the News | Site Map | Job Opportunities | Links |
|
ASAP Sports, Inc. | T: 1.212 385 0297
|