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BIG 12 CONFERENCE MEDIA DAYS

July 24, 2007

Dennis Franchione

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

CHARLIE FISS: We're ready to begin our session with Texas A&M. Coach Franchione, welcome to San Antonio. Your thoughts on your team as you prepare to begin.
COACH DENNIS FRANCHIONE: It's great to be here in San Antonio. I hope we're back in the first week of September. It would be nice to be back then. Hope you all had a great summer. It's nice to be close to the beginning of practice. Certainly excited about starting and excited about this team for a lot of reasons. I really like this team that we have.
We've got some good people on this team. We've got some great leaders on this team. Probably the best leadership we've had since I've been at Texas A&M. Great students. 15 out of our 17 seniors will have their degree by December; 5 of them will have it in about two weeks. And Stephen McGee is with us here today. And I need to mention this. Stephen has two years of eligibility remaining and he'll have his degree in about two weeks also. So pretty unusual for somebody to be in that situation.
But I like this group for a lot of reasons. They're 5-0 on the road last year, and certainly that's something to build on. That takes a degree of mental toughness and physical toughness and grit, fight, determination. It's hard to go undefeated when you play in the Big 12 on the road. And we were able to do that last year.
We've got some experience back. Eight starters back on offense. Six or seven back on defense, which is exciting. And when you talk about defense, year two of Coach Darnell's scheme. Last year was year one, and I think he was very careful about how much he put in not to overload the players.
And we ended up I think being second in the Big 12 in total yards per game, defensively in Big 12 games.
So we really made more improvement on that side of the ball. We're excited also about -- I want to mention the McFerrin Athletic Center that we moved into, which is an indoor practice facility that's state of the art, and having that available to us this year, I think, can help our team stay fresh and make it through the heat here sometimes.
It's important that we build on some of the things that we accomplished last year. And I feel good about these guys and their ability to do that.
CHARLIE FISS: Questions from the floor.

Q. Coach, you talked about this team and how much you like this team. But a lot of talk has been about the road that you guys are going to have to travel to accomplish what you want to. Can you talk about the challenges that are ahead there with the schedule?
COACH DENNIS FRANCHIONE: Certainly, if we manage this schedule we won't have to justify anything at the end of the year. But, you know, there's a lot of teams in our conference with tough schedules. I look at Nebraska's schedule. They've certainly got some challenges to USC and Wake Forest and Nevada and non-conference schedule and going to Texas. And that's the life in a BCS conference.
And we understand that and I think players get excited about the challenges they have in playing a schedule like this, and I think it helps your summer and it helps your off-season, and I know they're looking forward to these challenges.
And I know they have confidence to meet these challenges because of the way they were able to manage last year's schedule. You know, it's going to be a challenge, but, you know, we're used to that.
I think one thing that gets overlooked about last year's team, talking about schedules and things, you know, we came down to a couple of points in the OU game of being in the Big 12 South championship game or Oklahoma State maybe winning that last weekend. That's something that I think has left our guys with a lot of purpose to go into this season and to try to meet that challenge right there and is motivating for them.

Q. Can you elaborate on the defense a little bit and how much more is there to put in that didn't get put in last year, and also getting Red Bryant back and Harrington, what they will accomplish up front?
COACH DENNIS FRANCHIONE: Coach Darnell did a masterful job last year being a defensive coordinator in transition and teaching the new scheme and never putting his players in a position of not being confident in what they were going to do. As a result, we didn't have probably as much in a game plan week in, week out as you would like to have had or maybe some days wished you could have had.
Spring practice was a lot of change, a lot of addition, a lot of building and a lot more areas that we really were able to spend a lot of time on.
And now he'll pare that down a little bit and decide how much to take into the fall. But I would say there's probably been another 25 to 30 percent added in spring practice that we were really not able to do a great deal with any confidence last fall.
And then we lost Red Bryant those last two or three games, maybe four games, of the year. And Red is an outstanding player, but when you lose Red Bryant, you've lost a great person and a great leader on your team.
Our players look to Red for leadership. And when he wasn't there, other people had to try to absorb that. And I don't know if anybody can absorb what Red Bryant meant to his football team, in losing him as a leader, as much as anything. And, of course, as a player, losing him, too.

Q. After Texas A&M went so many years without beating its primary rival, what does beating Texas do in terms of heading into this season?
COACH DENNIS FRANCHIONE: I think it's a confidence builder. Hopefully a little bit of momentum. Our guys didn't lack confidence going to play them any of the years. They believed they could play with them and beat them. But we got it done last year.
And, again, going to Austin and winning in 5-0 on the road, all those things together, with the amount of experience we have coming back, lends those guys going into the season, We're going to get this done or we can do this, we know we can. I'm not sure our guys ever lacked confidence, but when you actually do it I think it's a real boost to them.

Q. Coach, at the quarterback position, McGee, the stamp on his game is toughness and how he's able to initiate contact as much as anybody. Is he doing a better job in your mind of keeping his eyes down the football field to throw instead of running the football as readily as he has in the past, expose himself to potential injury?
COACH DENNIS FRANCHIONE: I don't think I'm going to win the battle on him taking people on. I've tried. That's Stephen McGee's persona. But with regard to his throwing, we don't spend time talking about injuries at our place. And one of the things that happened to Stephen in two-a-days, in the second day of practice he tore a muscle in the back of his throwing arm. He did not throw again until the week of the first game. So he essentially missed all the throwing during August camp, and as much as anything missed the pocket presence, the feel for the rush, how to move in the pocket, and as a result I think as coaches we were probably trying to make sure that he didn't sit in the pocket and take a beating and take too many sacks, and we encouraged him to run with the football, which may have been a little part of him not finding a second or third receiver sometimes.
I think that burden needs to go on us more than him and more the circumstances of not being able to throw all through the month of August, which is -- as you all know, fall camp is such a pivotal time, especially for your first-time starter, essentially had he been a senior, wouldn't have maybe been as quite a big issue, but being as young as he was going into the season, it does have to have an impact on him. We all know Stephen McGee can throw the football. He's proven that time and time again.
So protecting him and letting him now he worked very hard on finding second and third progressions and everything in spring practice. And I think we'll see him better in all those areas.
It seems like so often that preseason is when we have so much of a thought of who is going to be the post-season award winners. I wanted to mention some of our individuals while we're here today. We've got some really outstanding players in the offensive line.
You've heard of Cody Wallace already. But Corey Clark at tackle and Kirk Elder and Yemi Babalola; our tight end, Martellus Bennett, and running backs, Jorvorskie Lane and Mike Goodson. And I don't know if there's any spots out there for him, but Chris Alexander is really an unsung hero on our football team. The key blocks that he threw last year in spring for touchdowns, both of the touchdowns in the last game against TU were blocked by Chris Alexander. Really made a difference.
You know about Chris and Red and Misi and Mark Dodge. And then our punter, Justin Brantly, really deserves to be kind of put out there. And the kind of years that we have they'll be mentioned for a lot of post-season things.
And I wanted to take a moment to mention all those young guys and I hope they do have the kind of year that reflects your interest in that. Thank you.
CHARLIE FISS: Thank you.

End of FastScripts

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