|
|||
|
|||
|
 |
|
|
FEDEX ORANGE BOWL: WAKE FOREST v LOUISVILLEJanuary 1, 2007Bobby PetrinoMIAMI, FLORIDA THE MODERATOR: Coach, want to open up with a comment just about with 24 hours approximately left to go until the game, the team's preparations and how much more is left to do. COACH BOBBY PETRINO: We're ready for the game, there's no question about that. We've been down here preparing hard. I like the way our coaches and players have handled it. They've come out in the mornings and had good meetings, had good focus in the meetings, went out on the practice field and worked extremely hard. We've been trying to make sure that we don't leave it on the practice field so we've cut things back the last couple days. That is the one concern is the difference in the heat and the humidity. It reminds you a little bit about getting back to two-a-days, so I think, though, yesterday we had a real sharp practice. We looked fast again, and that was good to see. We're excited to get tomorrow here and get out on the field and have a great game. Q. Anthony Allen, it seems like he's become more and more of a part of the offense as the season goes on. Can a true freshman when you have some practice time at the end of the regular season, can he improve from the end of the regular season to Tuesday night? COACH BOBBY PETRINO: I think he has improved since the season has been over. I think that's the best part with being the Trager Center back in Louisville is we've been able to practice inside, keep the young guys out after we're done preparing for the game and work them. Anthony is a young man that came in, and after one week we knew he was going to play as a true freshman. He just picked up the offense and was real special in his ability to learn, and he just keeps getting better. He's got a tremendous amount of confidence right now and has actually taken more reps in Bowl preparation than he normally did during the season. Q. The off season mantra has been finish, finish, finish, finish, even during the season. Have you guys developed that killer instinct that you've been preaching all summer, all last spring, and could you cite some examples where you think you have taken that last step towards finishing games like you talked about? COACH BOBBY PETRINO: It's something we talked about through the winter and the summer and all of our workouts. I think our strength coaches did a nice job with that. We talked a lot about it after the Rutgers game, getting back and finishing the season. I certainly liked the way we played and executed in basically all three phases at the end of the year. You worry about the layoff a little bit, but we have been talking about it this week because we need to finish the season. Really the seniors talking about finishing their career, going out 41 and 9, which would be a great thing for them. Q. Certainly not to diminish the importance of winning a Conference Championship and all of that, but how much would a win tomorrow night kind of stamp Louisville on the public consciousness as being up there with the Southern Cals and Michigans and Ohio States and things like that? COACH BOBBY PETRINO: Traditionally we have a long way to go to be with them. But that's what we're trying to build and work towards. When we started the season this year it was talking about taking the next step and winning the Big East Conference and getting to a BCS Bowl game. I feel like this is a step towards next season, and that's the importance of this game and winning this game is finishing for the seniors but then beginning our next step in what our goals will be next season. Q. Just talk about the late start tomorrow. What will you do during the day? How does that affect the whole game thing with it being later than normal? COACH BOBBY PETRINO: We're used to it really because we played so many night games this year. We tried to get a few during the day, but obviously the television stations run that. But we'll actually let them sleep in tomorrow. They'll like that. They've been up early every morning. We'll get them up and then we'll have a breakfast. We go do a walk-through, so we'll either drive to Barry University or we have another place that we could do our walk-through. I haven't decided exactly that yet. I'm getting kind of tired of driving, so we might just stay and do it at the tennis courts. And then we'll have a special teams meeting. We'll send them back to their rooms; they'll get to lay around. Luckily there will be games on TV. That helps a lot. You hate those Thursday night games because they get caught up on their soap operas, but it's nice to have football games on. They'll lay around, watch those, rest a little bit, and then we always have our pregame meal four hours before the game and then we have a clap session that we do in the meeting rooms before we get on the bus and head to the stadium. We always get to the stadium two hours prior to the game. Q. How big is it tomorrow just on whose style wins out? It seems like they want to kind of keep you guys off the field as much as possible on offense and kind of control the ball. How important is that to this game? COACH BOBBY PETRINO: You know, I think that's yet to be seen. It would be nice for us if the game went that we came out, got the ball, went and got a lead early, get a bigger lead, put pressure on them to try to play from behind. Obviously they would like to control the ball and do it just the opposite. Kind of wait and see. We're going to be very aggressive on both sides of the ball and really work hard in the first half trying to get a lead and put some pressure on them to play from behind. Q. How would you describe the importance of players from the city of Louisville since you've been here and how big a boost can it give a program if there's a few really good home town guys like you've got? COACH BOBBY PETRINO: Well, it was something that when we got the job, I think it was one of our main goals was to keep the best players from the city of Louisville at the University of Louisville, and it was a priority to all our recruiting. I also felt like it would be a great advantage to our fan base and being able to pack the stadium, get the sell-outs that we do have now. When you look at Michael Bush and Brian Brohm and Mario Urrutia, Earl Heyman, Aundre Henderson, the young guy you're going to see here in the next few years that we feel that fit into that category, they've been the main guys on our team, and I think it's been a big, big part of also building a tradition with our fan base. Q. At this luncheon Turner Gill will be one of the people honored, the quarterback for Nebraska. That game back in 1984 has really a lot to do with U of L's tradition which you all built with Howard Schnellenberger. It seems like everybody remembers watching. Do you remember anything from that? Does anything stand out? COACH BOBBY PETRINO: Not at all. Q. You didn't watch the Nebraska-Miami game in 1984 and you were coaching? COACH BOBBY PETRINO: I don't remember it at all. There's only so much room upstairs to remember. There's a lot of things I try to block out. You don't want to occupy too much of your memory. Q. Can you talk a little bit about your sense of anticipation right now, what you're feeling? COACH BOBBY PETRINO: Well, I get a little antsy now just simply because you're out of your normal routine. There's more people in the lobby, there's the Bowl atmosphere as opposed to just your normal game where you're isolated and the focus and the mood is different. But we'll try to really create that today. We get all the red shirts and the guys that are not going to dress, they'll have their own schedule, and our players will be in the same routine as a normal Friday. I was saying yesterday I didn't realize it was New Year's Eve, it was just Thursday to us. That's how we try to create it and do the exact same schedule that we do today with the exception of this and the luncheon that we would normally do on a Friday. It's really about how focused you can be, and as you kind of observe and watch all the Bowl games, one of the biggest things about playing in a game like this or the opening game of a season is to not beat yourselves. First chance you have to win a game is to not beat yourselves with turnovers and penalties and mistakes you don't normally make, so that's what we've been trying not to do. Q. Do you feel like your players have played pretty loose throughout the season, kind of ignored the pressure of big games, and do you expect that sort of thing again tomorrow? COACH BOBBY PETRINO: I think they've got to the point where they enjoy the pressure, and I think being in the big game is something we've enjoyed. We try to prepare for the big game, something we've been talking about since we got here. Even last year at the Gator Bowl we really tried to make sure that it was real serious, learn how to play in a big Bowl game, something where there's a lot of consequences, so we just keep working at it. I think our guys enjoy it. I think they like the stage and I think they like the competitiveness, and certainly has always done a good job of putting on a show when they're supposed to. Q. We've got two teams here that are sort of unconventional in a way in terms of breaking into the top rank and you've come two different paths. You've gotten a lot of exposure, played a lot of night games, and Wake Forest has sort of come up a more traditional route. Do you think this game represents different routes to the top now that are opening up maybe with more TV exposure, more ways to get -- COACH BOBBY PETRINO: I think it shows a lot of the parity in college football and the opportunities that are out there for everybody and just the ability to take advantage of opportunities. I think when you look at Wake Forest and the season that they had, the close games that they've won, the way they've gotten better, the way the years went on and taking advantage of their situation, we feel like we've had the same opportunities with the move into the Big East conference, something we've been working for for four years, building to it, understanding it was there. But it's a great opportunity for us, and now we just have to continue to do it, and I'm sure that's what they want to do, too, is to do it on a consistent basis so that you are mentioned in the same words with all those great tradition football powers. Q. You've gotten the players where they step out in the community, in particular Amobi Okoye with that young man, unless you blocked it out already. He was on your coaching show some time ago. Just talk about Amobi and what he does out in the community. COACH BOBBY PETRINO: About Amobi? Amobi is great. Amobi has a huge heart and appreciates a lot of the things that have happened in his past and the way he's grown up and the people that have influenced him, and you'll see him, I think, for years to come just giving back and helping as many people as he can. He's been great for our program, and it's been fun for me to watch how he's grown up and matured and became the leader of our football team this year. One thing that I think our players need to understand is that they've been given a tremendous amount of talent and certainly been blessed and now they can go back and give back to our people that aren't quite as lucky as they are. Q. The challenges that Hunter Cantwell has faced, he was your starting quarterback in the Gator Bowl, I mean, does that say something about what kind of kid he is that he still continues to work and work? I know he played some this year and he continues to improve, and I know he gets a lot of reps in practice, too. Can you just talk about Hunter? COACH BOBBY PETRINO: Hunter is going to be a great quarterback, it's just for how many years, and I guess some of that will be determined after the Bowl game here, how many years he's going to get. But I just keep talking to him about he's got an NFL arm and he's got NFL accuracy. He just needs to keep being a better student of the game, learning more about what our offense is, learning more about defenses. He's taking that very seriously. He's been very patient. The one thing about the quarterback position is you either transfer or you're patient and great things can happen in a short period of time. As a quarterback it only takes one or two years of playing real well at the college level to have a great future in the game. I'm very happy that he's chosen the second path of staying put and being patient and continuing to learn and get better. His opportunity will come again and he'll do a real good job. Q. It strikes me that you're delighted to be in a big Bowl, BCS Bowl like this, but at the same time opposite of that, you would rather just play the game and forget the press conferences and forget the luncheons and forget all the distracting type things and just focus on the football aspect of it. Do I read that correctly? COACH BOBBY PETRINO: That's the fun part of it is the practices and the games. Obviously this is a learning experience for everybody. That was one thing I thought that maybe we did a better job with our players this year is relaxing a little bit, enjoying the Orange Bowl experience, just making sure that we do it the right way and maybe not being as uptight as in the past years. So I'll keep working on that (laughter). Q. Wake Forest snuck up on a whole lot of people this year, even back in North Carolina. At what point did you realize they had something special going on? COACH BOBBY PETRINO: We got to watch them really early in the season. I think we were preparing for the Syracuse game and we got to watch them, they played Syracuse, and then we had video on them with UConn. I actually made a comment to our coaches that, you know, Wake Forest wouldn't be a bad place for us to go visit this spring. I really like some of the things they're going. They're doing some unique things offensively, doing a lot of the same things we do defensively, and now we end up matching up and playing them. We try to look out every year as a place to visit every spring and see where we can go steal some good thoughts. Q. We've noticed a lot of red and black down here. Just talk about what you've noticed with fans around, and kind of what you expect from your fan base tomorrow night. COACH BOBBY PETRINO: It's been great. You know, we went to the fan appreciation, there was more people than I've ever seen, more people than we anticipated. We could barely get everybody in the door. And then the event we had last night in talking about the stadium expansion was awesome, and to see the amount of power in that room was amazing to me. But it's just something that I think Louisville has been building for. I told the people at the event last night, congratulations on going to the Orange Bowl because you're the people that made it happen. I'm just glad that I've been on for the ride for the last four years because it's taken a tremendous amount of effort from a lot of people that people aren't even aware of, guys that went out and raised the money, guys that kept football going. Howard was there and certainly he played a big part in it. So I think everybody is enjoying that we're in the Orange Bowl, and we'll have a tremendous crowd there. I'm hoping they can make it just like it's a home game. Q. You have a lot of kids that have the potential to be drafted extremely high. How does that help you in the recruiting process? COACH BOBBY PETRINO: I think it helps because everybody -- at least everybody that we want to recruit I think needs to have a dream to play in the NFL and a drive to do that, just because of the amount of time and dedication it takes to be a great college football player. We also want to recruit guys that have the skill and the determination to get their degree, but certainly they look at who's being drafted, where they're being drafted from, what type of success they've had out there. We've got guys like Elvis Dumervil has had a great rookie year, and Kerry Rhodes, and we'll try to use everything we can to help us in recruiting. They certainly know what's going on, and they spend a lot of time on that internet so they're aware of all the players. Q. What impresses you the most about a school of 4,000 students getting to this stage, Wake Forest? COACH BOBBY PETRINO: What impressed me the most is I got to go there a few years back when I was coaching for the Jaguars and work out one of their quarterbacks, and it was really neat driving onto campus. It seemed like a little town or a little city of its own. But when you watch them on video and you watch them play, they don't make mistakes. They just do things right. They play the game right. They're very well coached. They understand what's coming. You can tell that they have a lot of experience, a lot of students of the game. A lot of times you go into a football game and you feel like, okay, we can take advantage of this here or we can make a check and take advantage of what's coming here, but they're going to know our tendencies, they're going to know what we do well and try to take those away. It's going to come down to physically we're going to have to block and tackle better than they do and play faster and be faster on the field. I just think that when you watch them on video they don't make mistakes and that's why they've won a lot of close games. Q. You've mentioned the fundraiser last night. I guess Muhammad Ali made an appearance. Were you in the room when he came out, and what was that like, and what does it say about the program that Muhammad Ali would make an appearance at a fundraiser for Louisville football? COACH BOBBY PETRINO: It was really special. I haven't seen Muhammad a whole lot, and to have him come in, it was neat. I think Tom Jurich and Dr. Ramsey did a great job of getting the event together and all the different people that were there, and then to top it off with him coming in was really special. I know everyone in the room certainly appreciated it. You knew that the Champ was walking in. End of FastScripts |
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
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
|