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BIG TEN CONFERENCE FOOTBALL MEDIA DAYSJuly 18, 2019Michael LocksleyChicago, Illinois MICHAEL LOCKSLEY: First of all, good afternoon. It's great to be here in Chicago with you guys. I hope you guys have had a terrific summer. I'll try to keep it brief and not give an information up here for Maryland, but I'll start with this: Anyone who knows me knows from the time I got into this business 27 years ago, the Maryland football job was the job I coveted. I've said this before, and I'm going to keep saying it: This is a dream come true for my family and I am able to come home and coach the university that I grew up rooting for as a kid. I'm going to tell you a quick story and it kind of summarizes me and my career. At my house, we have these wood plaques, and they're hung up in our kitchen in chronological order, and these plaques represent all the different places I've coached. And at the top of the 11 plaques I think it is now, it says, "home is wherever football takes us." Well, just recently I added my third Maryland plaque at the bottom, and I hope it's the last plaque that I add to my home. But what I learned is that these plaques symbolize so many great emotions and memory that my family and I have from being a part of college football and from the people that we've been able to meet through all these journeys and what a great opportunity for me to learn, grow, and develop as a coach. And I mean, I've worked at small places like my alma mater Towson State to competing for National Championships like I did at Alabama. And so as they like to say, the old saying, the third time's a charm, I'm hoping that's the case here for me at Maryland. There's been three main messages that me and the coaching staff has hammered home with our staff since we took over six months ago, and the first thing we wanted to do was we wanted to create this family culture. And by doing this -- to me, teams have a shelf life. Teams change from year to year, whereas family to me transcends our past with our present as well as our future. And so we wanted to create a family environment and a family culture to get our program moving forward. The second thing we've done is we've stabilized the program. We all know about what happened last year, and it was really important for us to come in and, one, do a really good job of developing a meaningful relationship with our players. I can't tell you how many Sunday fun days I've had at my house with the team. And I know my coaches have taken a personal interest in each of the players at their positions, and what that does is it builds trust, and trust is a great huge component for being able to stabilize the program. The next thing we've done is we've also did everything we could to have a great respectful communication as well as an open-door policy with our players. And I think that's important. Because if you ever raised kids, you know this: When all the kids in your neighborhood are hanging at your house, you've got a pretty good home. And what I've found since we've taken over, our players are always around our offices, they're always upstairs and with our coaching staff. And that to me tells me that we've really moved in the right direction of stabilizing it. And then the last thing is we've really painted a really clear, concise picture of what our expectations are and how we want to do our business, and it starts with developing the right kind of behaviors. We use a term "maximize it" around our place, and here's what maximize it means -- and if you talk to any of our players, they'll tell you that maximize it means we want to be really intentional with our behaviors, and whatever it is that we're doing at that particular time is the most important thing we do. If you're in the classroom, be where your feet are and be very intentional about taking something from the classroom. If you're in the meeting before practice, be there. If you're at practice, let's make sure all of our energies and efforts and behaviors are right where we are at that time. And at the end of the day, what we want our players to do, and this is something that I do, is at night if you've maximized it, like we talk about, when you lay your head down on the pillow at night, you know you've lived a full day and you've done it the right way with the right behaviors and the right intentions. I'd be remiss if I didn't tell you this, that we're very fortunate as a university to be a part of the Big Ten Conference. And I want to thank Commissioner Jim Delany for all that he's done, not just for the Big Ten, but also for college football as a whole. This is my second time back in the Big Ten, and what Commissioner Delany has done keeping the Big Ten in the forefront of the college athletics with the combination of academic excellence as well as athletic excellence is great for the game. And I want to thank him for that. And also want to welcome Kevin Warren in, and I know that he'll do a tremendous job of continuing to move the Big Ten to where we are at the top of college athletics with the vision and the efforts it takes to be a great conference. This summer we put in a bunch of work with our players, not just with play books, and we've done a lot of things from life skills that we think will help and benefit our players off the field to where they can have future success. And we've done a really good job of trying to build their resumes outside of just football. One of the benefits of being located where we are is the use of two of the largest media markets or one of the largest media markets, two of the best job markets, the D.C./Baltimore corridor, and our players have taken full advantage of being located where we are. Our players are excited, and I speak for all of us when I tell you that we're excited about the start of the season, and we're looking forward to seeing our fans pack Maryland stadium on August 31st when we open up with Howard University. And I also want to thank you guys for the job you do as the media of telling such positive stories about our program, and we look forward to continuing to give you guys great stories in the near future. With that, I will open it up to any questions. Q. Probably an easy question, but why was Maryland your dream job? MICHAEL LOCKSLEY: Well, you've known me for a while, and you remember all those Maryland-D.C. guys we brought to Illinois back in the day. It started as a kid growing up. A lot of people don't understand, but I grew up in an era in the '70s -- the mid-'70s when Maryland was a giant in college athletics and football, and they had an undefeated team in '76 when I was 7 years old and had a three- or four-year run there. And then as I matured and grew up and became a teenager, the mid-'80s from '83, '84, '85, having an opportunity to see the Boomer Esiason, Frank Reich, Neil O'Donnell, Stan Gelbaugh, all these great quarterbacks and players that were great players. And, again, Maryland was a giant in college football at that time, and then I had the fortune of being a part of the renaissance year of 2001 through '3 when Ralph Friedgen came in and we won a conference championship. And we won 10 games a year for three straight years and produced great players like Vernon Davis, Shawne Merriman, LaMont Jordan, EJ Henderson, a bunch of great players. So that's the Maryland that I know, and I know a lot of people outside of that DMV area don't understand, but we have a history and tradition of great success, and it's a great university. Q. How did you approach when you got the job, the transfer situation, especially getting some guys into key positions? And there's a lot of conversation about the transfer portal, but as a coach taking over a program, how does that streamline the process? MICHAEL LOCKSLEY: I think the big thing when I first took over was to manage our current roster. And I know when I took the job over, we had quite a few guys that had entered the transfer portal prior to me becoming the head coach. And one of the things I did the first day after being hired is I kind of -- I called it speed dating. I met with every player for about 15 minutes, and I asked them what they liked about being a Maryland football player, and I asked them what they didn't like. And I took great notes and really worked on starting to develop a relationship. But I also had a game plan in my mind as to things we would need to correct. Very fortunate that I was only three years removed from being a coach there, and we'd lost, I think, maybe one or two players through the transfer portal. And on the flipside of it, because of some of the relationships I've built throughout my career in coaching at other places, I've been very fortunate to take advantage of the transfer portal where we've got the likes of players like Josh Jackson coming in, a starting quarterback from Virginia Tech that has won a lot of games and has great game experience. Shaq Smith, transferring in from Clemson, Keandre Jones from Ohio State, Sean Savoy from Virginia Tech. So we've been able to maybe fill some gaps and fill some holes that will help us do the things that we need to do to try to become successful. Q. I wanted to ask you about Keandre Jones and the transfer portal. How important is that as a first-year coach to build your program through the portal, and how do you see him being a part of your program? MICHAEL LOCKSLEY: Yeah, I mean, I don't say that it's a definite need when building a program to go to the transfer portal route because it's really important, one, that you bring in the right kind of guys that fit what you want to do. Obviously I had a very personal strong relationship with Keandre. He had committed to Maryland when I was there back in '15 along with Dwayne Haskins. And when I left to go to Alabama, I know they decided to go elsewhere. But what Keandre brings to the table for us is just having been a part of a winning program, I like to say success leaves clues, and Keandre has been able to bring some of those clues with him. And how he teaches our players as an older player that has had great success at a high level like I've had as a coach, the behaviors and habits that you need to create to get to where you can be successful as a program. And I really like the work ethic that he brought to the table. He kept his mouth shut and he's really earned the respect of our team with his leadership based on how he works and the behaviors and habits that he has. Q. You talked about this being your dream job. How great is it you being the first black coach in the history of Maryland? Is that more important to you? And also from a historic perspective, is that first game against Howard super important to you, as well? MICHAEL LOCKSLEY: You know, the whole black head coach thing obviously is a horse we've ridden for a long time. And as I've said before, I think it's important only that I be successful as a black head coach at the University of Maryland, and the only way that happens is with me, again, like I teach our players, having the behaviors and habits that it takes to be successful and win. Obviously Howard University is right there in our backyard. I grew up there in the city, and I remember Howard University winning the mythical championship in '87 and Harvey Reed and some of these great players that have come from it. So for us to be able to play a local school like Howard, it's really important. But it's really important because it's the first game of our season. That's where all of our energy and efforts have been pushing toward, and we're definitely looking forward to having Howard come to Maryland's stadium and compete on August 31st. Q. What did you learn from your time working under Nick Saban, and how do you think you've matured from your time of your last head coaching stint at New Mexico? MICHAEL LOCKSLEY: I get this question asked often. We'd need a whole 'nother two-hour session for me to talk about the things I learned from Nick. But what I will tell you is with those plaques that I described, I think each one of my experiences have given me an opportunity to learn, grow and move forward as a head coach. But if I learned anything from Coach Saban, it's, one, consistency in your messaging. He talks about the process. I call it behaviors and habits. Also we do a thing called quality control, and I think that is a huge thing because people think when you have the success we had at Alabama under Coach Saban that it's easy, but it's so hard to teach your players when you're having success. And I know he oftentimes says, hey, don't waste a failure. But when we have had success, we'd still go back and we still went back and looked at why it was successful and we asked the tough questions of how we can make it better. So for me, I love the term "success leaves clues," and "don't waste a failure," and I'm going to take all the clues learned at Alabama, implement them, have our players learn the behaviors and habits to be not result-oriented but to be process-oriented. And if we can focus on learning and having those types of habits and behaviors, I see Maryland being able to reach the success that we all want. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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