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ROSE BOWL GAME: PENN STATE v USCDecember 31, 2008Pete CarrollPASADENA, CALIFORNIA GINA CHAPPIN: Alright. I'd like to welcome head coach of USC, Pete Carroll. We'll have Pete make an opening statement, and then we'll turn it over for questions. Again, we have mikes on either side. Please state who you're with. Welcome, Coach. COACH PETE CARROLL: Thank you. I don't know if we're all here together. It's good to see you guys. Happy New Year to everyone. This is a really exciting time now. We're on it. Day before the game, our hotel where we stay, all this adds to a big buildup for a great football game. We spent the evening with the Penn State staff last night, and Coach Paterno was fired up and all he could do is tell me how great I was and how great our program was and this is best defense he's ever seen, best offense, quarterback, on and on. I kept shaking my head. "Come on, Coach, come on." He said, "No, it's all the truth. All the truth." As the night wore on, he just got more fired up about this game. I could tell he's ready and we're ready. Also we're matched up for a terrific football game. Really looking forward it. We're coming in pretty healthy. Coming in -- coming off a really good preparation. Guys were in it the whole time. We had great work all the way up through yesterday. We had a mock game yesterday for situations, and all the guys were right on it. And so everything leads to, you know, the matchup that we've all been hoping for, and I'm really excited about the way we're prepared and ready to go. I'm going to give it a great shot and see if he can get a win in this year's Rose Bowl. GINA CHAPPIN: Questions for Coach. Q. You mentioned that you're pretty healthy. Could you elaborate a little bit on Damian Williams, Adam Goodman, and Kevin Ellison. COACH PETE CARROLL: Damian Williams and Stafon Johnson practiced the whole time this week, ready to go. They took full speed work the entire time. We know they're up. Kevin Ellison won't make it. He just has not been able to get back to practice since the last game. We're feeling good and strong and made it through. Often with all of these practices, you get guys nicked or something happens, but that didn't occur this time. We made it through. Q. Pete, what kind of problems does Aaron pose for your offensive line? COACH PETE CARROLL: Anytime you have a guy that plays so hard and so consistently, you know, you have to be aware of them all the time, and so in protections and in the scheme of things, we got to know where he is. He's one of those classy pass rush guys that I'm really concerned about the fact that he brings it play after play. So you always have to know, play actions and things like that. He really has an instinct for attack the line of scrimmage, and he's got really good speed and all of the things that premiere pass rushers have. You know, they don't move him around where you can't find him. We know where he is. It's very apparent that he can disrupt a game by himself. Q. Just can you explain again what happened with Havili and how you think that not having him might impact what you want to do on offense? COACH PETE CARROLL: In the system of accounting for the grades, it took a long time for his grades to get through. Three of our guys are in the same situation. One reason or another. It took awhile. He came up short units-wise, so he can't play. Q. The impact you think not having him might have? COACH PETE CARROLL: He's a very, very good football player for us. The situation was he's been hurt, and he was hurt going in two weeks -- the last two weeks. So we haven't been practicing with him prior to that. So we were preparing whether or not he would be in the game physically. It didn't affect us that part of it, but Stanley has been a great football player for us. Done a lot of really good things. Liked the variety of things he can do. We're going to use three guys in the spot to take care of where Stanley normally does by himself. Q. Coach, having a chance to be around Coach Paterno like you have this past week, what impresses you most about him? COACH PETE CARROLL: His spirit is so strong and his love for this game and coaching. It comes through in everything. We told -- we went back and forth talking last night. He was telling stories all night long about former coaches or players or games, and you can tell that he has tremendous love for what he's doing. Talked about family, talked about the coaching staffs and what kind of -- how they've been able to do it and closely knit small town there. He's a remarkable person, you know, to be able to carry this kind of spirit for so long through his career. He might be the living image of Benjamin Button here. He's got all kinds of life to him. I think anybody who -- any person that's in his eighties that can see what he's like and what he's all about would marvel at his way. He's really something. I've been with Joe, I don't know, maybe five, six, seven years ago at some functions, we were at, and he was the life of the party. He and Sue, great people to have around. Keep things going and telling jokes and making the fun, and you can see why he's enjoyed it, too. He likes living the life, and he talked about being blessed having all these years that he got to put behind him in coaching and the fun that he's had. He's still having fun. Just a remarkable person and obviously most famous and successful guy of all time. It's very, very interesting combination of all of the factors that make up what Coach Paterno is about. Q. Hey, Coach, during the season with the one-loss teams playing out of the rankings, you guys seem to have been near the bottom of them based on the thought the PAC-10 was not up this year. They're 3-0 in Bowl games beating the Big 12, ACC and BYU along the way. Has that got you rethinking at all that maybe you guys should be playing on January 7th or 8th, or are you guys happy with where you are? COACH PETE CARROLL: We're playing on January 1st and thrilled to be doing it. I think -- you know, I don't get into the part about lobbying for where you should go or any of that. I just don't feel comfortable with that. We know that our most difficult games every year are in our conference. This isn't like something you just say it's the truth and it's because our teams are so well schooled, they're equipped with terrific football players, and our greatest challenges for the last eight years have been in the PAC-10. So it's no different this year. You saw Oregon State team come alive this season. They had a slow start, got going, and played great football throughout the year, and for whatever reason, that game for us was one that was not respected in a sense, and Oregon State proved that anybody who thought that was wrong about the year they had. The problem with what's going on is you have to evaluate the kind of how you feel about a team's season, how you feel about it, not necessarily who is the best team, it's how you feel about it, and that's the unfortunate part of the BCS system. It's the best system that we have. People have worked really hard to make it work and make it accountable and all that. I have no problem with that. It's just I'm not going to hang my feelings about our work and our body of work during the course of a season on what that poll turns out, and I know Coach Paterno feels the same way, et cetera, been saying it for years. He didn't know if the BCS or the BCS. I feel the same way about it in that regard. So I don't have any frustration at all. Our team doesn't have frustration at all. It would be nice to be in the championship game because we earned our way to the championship game through a playoff system. Other than that, we get to do what we get to do. We get a great matchup and great game, and who is to say who is the best team? We won't know it until the end of the year. We'll know who won the BCS Championship. I think the teams that are playing are great football teams. They're as likely to be the national champion in a playoff system as any other teams and all of that, but there's -- I don't harbor any problem in how this thing turned out at all. The players are pretty clear about that, too. I think it's just the way we've come to understand it. Remember, we understand this clearly from being in the position years ago. And I don't even know what year it was when we were playing Michigan. We were ranked by one poll here, one poll there, and one poll somewhere else, and wind up coming out 1-1-3. I don't know how it works but it did. From that point we've all understood where you place in the process. You know, this is an opportunity. I couldn't be more in favor of us playing games off, but I understand there's problems, and I don't have the solution. I don't know. I'm going to keep doing the best we can with what we have and have a blast doing that, and sometime, you know, if we have -- I know if we have a season where we win every game, we have a really good chance to win the national championship. You got to win them all. It's really hard to do, obviously. Everybody thinks the teams that are up in the top five, six teams should have all at some point won the rest of their games, but it's hard to do that. And I know that the way our conference is played, we've done a fantastic job showing that, and our coaches are getting rewarded for the challenges that we go through during the regular season, and all and with big wins here in these bowl games. All the rest of the hype is hype. When our conference plays other conferences, we do really well. I know that. When our team plays other teams, we do really well. Anything else is just part of the process and the system and history and all the rest of it. That's a really long answer for that short question. (Laughter). Q. Coach, Penn State really didn't face a real potent passing attack this year on it's schedule. What have you seen from their secondary things that maybe they do and things you might be able to exploit? COACH PETE CARROLL: They played a lot of good throwing teams, and they've played well no matter who they played. They played all different styles of offense they've seen in their conference throughout their schedule very well. They've played great defense like great defenses do. They start up-front. They're really good up-front. They don't let you run the football out of -- their physical, tough, linebackers tackle really well. Schematically they're prepared to do whatever they need to do. They have all of the stuff that you need to stop a high-powered passing game with pass rush as well. So, we know that they're good, and we know that they have guys in the right plays, and they and they know what they're doing. I think I've seen enough to give us all kinds of problems. We've been struggling through it the last couple of weeks. Q. On the flip side, can you talk about the Penn State receiving core and how you think you might matchup with them? COACH PETE CARROLL: Yeah. The thing that's exciting about their offense is the way they use Derrick Williams. And we know Derrick. We recruited him way back when and watched him come out of high school as an all-around athlete. They've obviously recognized that and moved him all around. He's the problem for us. They have some other guys that do a nice job, but Derrick is the problem because like when we saw the Reggie Bush offense where you can make the guy a running back and receiver and lineup as a back but do receiver things, that gives a defense a lot of problems. We're also connected to the personnel that's on the field and who they put out there. One guy does the job of two, three guys, then it causes problems and you have to call defenses that can capture all of that and it restricts you some. I think Derrick is the key to the whole thing, and he runs like a running back and plays like a running back, but he's a great receiver. And so that's an issue for us, and so I know now that he's also. He played quarterback at times during the season. And with the format that we had to use him to prepare for the backup, we know he's even more prepared than ever to be in that spot. They can take Daryll and kick him out and do all kinds of things with him. Their receiving core is highlighted so much by what he can do, that's where he's drawn all of our attention. Hopefully we can do a nice job against him. Q. Been here what, eight years, how have you grown and evolved as a coach in that period of time? COACH PETE CARROLL: Well, fortunately I've been able to, you know, have a lot of good things happen, and so I've got a lot of support to the mentality and the philosophy and kin of the culture that we wanted to create years ago, and in that, you know, I believed in what we were doing from the start and then supported the things we were doing to work it. So you become stronger. What's happened I've become a lot stronger in my beliefs and more grounded in kind of the foundation of how we do things and what we do. We don't do things like everybody else. We have some different ways that we go about putting our program together and that in other settings and other times have been challenged, you know, to the point where they sent me packing a couple times, and I really haven't changed my approach at all from way back at the Jets when we fell apart there in my first season as the head coach. Because of the success that's been received, they've given me a chance to be a little farther in the direction that we like to go and all that. I've found a lot of confidence in it. We've become a lot better at it and more proficient in all of the things that we do. It's like anything else, you know, if you believe in something and stay with it, you grow and you don't stay the same. Dynamically, you continue to add to the stuff, and if you're fortunate, you can strengthen your position and all. That's really what's happened more than anything. I kind of ran out of juice on that answer. (Laughter). GINA CHAPPIN: Any more questions for Coach? Alright. COACH PETE CARROLL: Nice being with you. FastScripts by ASAP Sports... End of FastScripts |
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