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ACADEMY TEXAS BOWL: TEXAS VS MISSOURIDecember 26, 2017Barry OdomHouston, Texas COACH ODOM: Good morning. Thank you all for being here today and covering our football team and our football program and our great university. It's been such an unbelievable week for us in the City of Houston and you know, a lot of -- many, many thanks to all the folks, the great hospitality. We've had a number of kids from Texas on our roster and from the greater Houston area, and it's great for them to be home, and for us, continuing to build our program. The recruiting emphasis in the State of Texas will be a large part of our footprint moving forward. So for many, many reasons, it was great to be in the City of Houston and in Texas. The Bowl game, you really look at the Academy of Sports and Outdoors Bowl, all of the different things that they have provided for our team and the experiences that they have provided this week for all of our young men and the entire travel party; so grateful and thankful for them. I know it's a 365-day job for that organization and for them to put on the work and the tireless hours and all of the work that they have put into it for our kids and our student athletes, to have an experience that they will carry with them for the rest of their life, I am forever grateful for all the work that they put into it. The volunteers that over the Christmas holiday and holiday season; that they were away from their families to help make this the experience that it's been. So thankful for that. And you know, congratulations to Coach Herman and his staff and team on being here. Tremendous opportunity and challenge for our football team to match up against a really good football team. Very well-coached, as you start looking at the video we did after the announcement, should be a great game tomorrow night. We are locked in as a football team and as a program. In our small world, it's Friday, Friday around 11:30. So we'll get locked into that. We'll have a walk-through and position meetings as soon as the lunch is over, get to go to the stadium and have a chance to do a walk-through there which will be great for our guys and we are into a normal Friday night routine for us. I'm proud of our football team. My staff and the group of guys, 18 seniors that we've got, I'm going to address some of the same things in here as I go next door. So if you go to the luncheon, you'll be bored with my comments. But I believe with great conviction that I've got the best job in the world and the reason I have that is because of my team and my football players and the student athletes that we've got. I'm thankful for their efforts and all the things that they have done. We've learned a number of great life lessons this year together and they have shown great resolve. They have worked together, tremendous effort on holding together when things weren't great and fighting through adversity and continuing to build our football program the way it needs to be built. I'm thankful for the things that they have done and now we've got an opportunity to go play one more game together and that means the world to me and it means an awful lot to 115 guys that we've got that make up our university and the athletic program representing all of the things that this football team has done, we're excited about it. So open it up to questions and again, thank you all for being here and all the coverage you've provided for our football team and this Bowl game specifically. Q. Does this still feel like a neutral site game to you? How does it affect your outlook on playing a former Big 12 opponent? COACH ODOM: Well, if you've covered our team and the local reporters that are here know that I'm not real good with two-part questions, so I may have to ask you to repeat some of that. But I know enough on where we are geographically on how many people are going to be in the stands and what colors they are going to be wearing. We've talked about that. One thing with our program and our team and this group of guys, and every team is different, we deal with each other because we've built such true and trusting relationships. We deal, in fact and in honesty. We know where the game is. We're excited to have that opportunity to step into this environment. One of the greatest environments -- and to play the game of football, I was at the stadium yesterday watching the Texans play and what an unbelievable environment it will be for our kids. We've got to the point over the course of the year that it doesn't matter if we're at home, away, playing in the parking lot: Our guys are ready to go compete and go play. We had a press conference, or on with the radio show before the Texas game yesterday, Coach Herman and I, and as I watched the fans interacting with us on the stage, there weren't many waving at me. There were a whole bunch waving at him. We'll take it for what it is. We'll embrace the opportunity to go play a really good team in this environment. Q. Have you decided who is going to be calling offensive plays for you and how does that change the performance on the field with Lock getting the calls in his headset and relaying them to your offense? COACH ODOM: Well, on the plays that work, if we happen to have success, offensively, then I called those, okay. I made those play calls. In the college game, you can't relay. The players don't wear headsets or microphones. We signal all of our plays in. Our offensive staff has on a tremendous job on continuing to build on what they did during the season. Nothing has really changed as far as the approach on what we've taken, on putting our kids in position to be successful; and that's any time that you go into a game plan, you take the personnel that you've got, you've got to be a tremendous teacher and then you put in play what you think will put your guys in position to be successful. So the offensive staff has continued to roll on on moving in the right direction. Coach Finley, who was brought up in this system, will make the play calls tomorrow, and he has for the last couple weeks in practice. They have done -- credit to them. They have done a heck of a job on stepping up, and everybody's got a little more on their plate when you have coaching departures; that's the name of the game. I wouldn't say we see any noticeable change as far as what we are doing offensively as far as the play calls go. Q. What did you specifically change after your 1-5 start? I'm sure half the coaches in the country want to know. COACH ODOM: I'm going to sell it for 19.99 and if you call now, you can buy one, get one free. We'll see how that goes in the off-season. Really, we didn't change much. We've got a really good group of kids that were bought in together; that cared about each other; that now -- we were doing a lot of things in our program the right way and we were getting so close to breaking down the wall. We just weren't playing good on Saturdays. The things they continue to do, their practice habits were exactly the way we needed them to be. Their preparation was getting close to what it needed to be to put us in position to play successful and then we started to gain some confidence, even though we were coming up short at the end of four quarters, we weren't scoring enough and we weren't holding to less points than we needed to. So we were gaining some confidence you know, and like I've said earlier, I wouldn't recommend starting 1-5. That wasn't really good on anybody but our guys did enough. They believed and they trusted in the process and in each other to hold together and then we were able to execute a little bit better on the game field. Q. Did you have a bonfire? COACH ODOM: We did. It was big. It was large. Q. What all was in the bonfire? COACH ODOM: It's been well documented. There was a whole bunch of stuff. I thought the players were going to throw me in there; they had enough of it. Really they drew a line in the sand and they were ready to go win a game. And again, we had done so many really good things within our program. Nobody wants to hear it but it's important, about your class attendance, the way you work in the weight room, the way your locker loom -- the health of your locker room. All those things add up to having a chance to win a game on Saturday. We were doing all those things. They were moving in the right direction. We just weren't winning football games, and at the end of the day, it's a results-driven business. I understand that. Our guys continued to battle and show great resolve and got it done together. Q. With all the guys that aren't playing for Texas, does it make them a tougher scout when you're watching them on film and certain guys aren't going to be in the game? COACH ODOM: I think you read, there's an enormous amount of information out there. I know this: They will have 11 guys out there when we start the game and so will we. You stick true to what you've seen on film. There's always in-game adjustments as you go through. You don't wait till half-time to make adjustments. You make them between series and a lot of times as the series is going on. So we feel like we've done a really good job game planning on who we think that they are and you look at a Bowl game, in most of them, you've got about 15 opportunities to go through and change some things, either side of the ball, and you know, we've made some slight adjustments like we do week-to-week and I'm sure they have done the same thing. Q. Specifically at quarterback, Tom said both his guys are going to play. What do you see out of either of those guys and similar or does the offense change? COACH ODOM: There are similarities. Anybody that's playing multiple quarterbacks, you've got to prepare, obviously, to see both of them, and I think we will. That's happened throughout the course of this season and our conference that we've seen some of that. You also know that your calls don't vary too much. You've just got to be aware on how you call it with which quarterback's in. They are both great competitors, and you know, as I watched their -- from start to finish on their season, they have improved on the course of the year and they are both really good players. Q. What did you see in Bowl practices that excites you about your defensive line heading into this game? COACH ODOM: Well, specifically with the defensive line, but overall, our football team, we had 14 really, really good practices. I mean, the guys were eager to get out on the field. They enjoy the opportunity to get better and compete, and they understand the process of what it takes to go play a complete game. We didn't waste an opportunity. I was happy on really every day we made progress. We made progress of our vets that have been in the program, as far as game planning and executing the game plan out throughout practice. And then when we set aside time to fit in our younger guys and get some developmental work for our program, they approached that the right way. We have got a pretty mature football team, and they did a lot of really good things over the last three and a half weeks. Q. What are some examples of what makes Drew Lock, Drew Lock? COACH ODOM: Well, I think you look at his approach to the game, his study and desire to be a great quarterback. He's got a tremendous football IQ. He understands what we're trying to do offensively. He's got a good grasp on when we get a certain coverage on where we need to go with the football, or does he check the play and get us into a run option that will help us a little bit more. So all of those things have to do with, No. 1, he's a tremendous competitor. He wants to be great, and there's not anybody in our building that has out-worked him in his preparation on trying to lead this football team to wins. Q. I've seen a lot of national people, in doing their Bowl matchups, they look at this game and they seem to be sort of dismissive about y'all's winning strength because of who you beat and how those teams ended up. I'm sure you've seen some of that talk, too. Does that get under y'all's skin a little bit? Winning games in the SEC seems legitimate to me but is that -- COACH ODOM: If you read a lot that's been out there this year, and you know, there's -- you could let your mind go a number of different ways. For us, we've focused on trying to go 1-0 one more time and it doesn't matter, like I said earlier, where we're playing, who we're playing. Our focus is on us; on making sure we do all the things and the steps necessary to get into the competitive environment and then go play our best game. So we've taken -- this team serves it pretty well, just to look at it one game at a time, if you're worried about what we did two weeks ago or three weeks ago or six weeks ago, then that has no effect on how we're going to play on Wednesday night. And same thing for us, looking ahead, it does us no good. So we've got plenty of motivation. We've got internal motivation for us to do it for 18 seniors to finish the season the right way, to go 1-0 one more time, and I wouldn't want to be lined up with another team in America trying to go get that done. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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