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BIG TEN CONFERENCE MEDIA DAYSAugust 2, 2010Bret BielemaCHICAGO, ILLINOIS THE MODERATOR: Okay. We'll go ahead and get started here. The first coach up is Wisconsin head coach Bret Bielema. COACH BIELEMA: Thank you, Julie. Sorry I was a little late. I was on the phone with Commissioner Delany and I have the new expansion guidelines right here in front of me (laughter). Thought you guys would like that one. It is great to be here. I don't know if I like to be the opening kick-off. I would have deferred this one if I could. But, you know, to be here in Chicago and be ready, we got our three guys here with us. I will note that over the last six months, one of my 2010 resolutions was to be more friendly with the media. So I'm going to point out over the last month I've actually let a major magazine come in and shoot me cooking dinner in my house for two of my buddies, because it's a little tradition I have to try and get better relations there. I actually played golf with a media member yesterday for 18 holes on a Sunday, which I never thought I'd ever do, but enjoyed every minute of it. And tip it off, top it off, to come here this morning and start off this whole thing with you guys. I hope you'll reflect it later on with some of the questions you give me and my players. I'm trying to expand my relations with you guys. I was going to walk in with a Rose Bowl hat but I thought it would be a little over the top to give you a story to write. This is an exciting season for two reasons. First off, we have a lot of good players coming back, and I really think that the players that we have returning for the first game or the first meeting that we had in January, we -- I have a little tradition we'll come back our first day of classes and we'll start off with that afternoon meeting with the entire team in there. And as the meeting winds down, then I'll actually keep all of our seniors, all the guys that are going to be seniors for this upcoming season, after for a few minutes. And one of the things that first jumped out to me as the rest of the team left, all 16 guys that were in those first two rows of my meeting room had all started a game during their time here at the University of Wisconsin. Many of them had been multi-game starters, but every one of those seniors had started a game. In my entire coaching career that's never happened. It's very unusual to have that many guys that have played such a significant role during their time already before their senior year. So it's exciting for me because all of those seniors are in that room because I have offered them a scholarship or allowed them an opportunity to be there. And that's the first time I can say that since being the head coach at Wisconsin. This will be my first senior class that's come full circle. The other thing that gets exciting is because of those players that we returned, and because of the way that we finished the season a year ago, there's a lot of high expectations and a lot of people saying nice things about us. But the thing we really tried to instill since January to where we are today the only way you can guarantee tomorrow's success is to put your work in today. And I think our guys have really bought into that. I know that they've really competed well for our strength staff during the course of the summer workouts. I was really excited about the way they competed during spring drills, and from an injury standpoint most of our guys should be 100 percent healthy. We might have a few guys be limited. Mike Taylor and Chris Borland, two linebackers that will play significant roles for us, coming off some major surgeries. They may be limited as far as double-day practices, but as far as the opening day at camp, they're a full go. John Clay, you'll be able to visit with him later, is a hundred percent full go, ready as well. So it's an exciting time for us at Wisconsin and for the most part it should be something that we hold that excitement hopefully for a very long time going into the year. With that I'll open it up for any easy questions. THE MODERATOR: Questions? Q. Question about expansion. It would be -- you have two long-term rivalries with Minnesota and Iowa. How important is that to the fabric of Wisconsin football that those continue, or could it be on the wayside and it's not a big deal to the program? COACH BIELEMA: As all of you in this room, really, I haven't had much communication about this part of it. We just kind of get the news as you guys report it. We might have certain meetings advanced two, three years out where we got to discuss things, but I did like the commissioner's -- one of the first things he talked about was competitive balance but keeping the rivalries intact as we currently have them and the third part being geography. So as a person that participated here in the conference as a player, I know how important those rivalries were to you. And it jumped out to me during my first year at the University of Wisconsin, one of the traditions that Coach Alvarez has was he would allow the seniors or the team to pick season goals. And that year we had a young man from Indiana of all places, Jason Pociask, a tight end for us. He raised his hand, and quite simply one of his senior season goals was to beat Iowa. I'm like, if this is a kid from Indiana playing at Wisconsin and one of his season goals was to beat Iowa, that made a huge statement to me about the impact of that rivalry to that young man. And I think that's the case. We have a longstanding rivalry with Iowa. And also Minnesota. Minnesota, one of the longest in history of football. That's one we'd like to keep intact. But I think because it is a new conference you're going to have new rivalries, and if you do follow -- I tweet -- I'm not saying I'm really good at it -- but one of the first things I tweeted was if Nebraska is coming to our league, it would be neat to have them maybe as an end-season rivalry game. Because we don't have that currently. We've kind of rotated between not only my time as a coordinator but as a head coach what our season-ending game is. I love the Ohio State-Michigan game. Before I was playing college football I watched that game. It's what it is. I'd like to have tradition for ourselves, whether it's Minnesota, whether it's Iowa, whether it's Nebraska. If they come up with something else, I'm all game, but let's have something and run with it. Hopefully you guys had a pool on what that first question would be. Might be a common theme. Q. You just mentioned now that you tweet. Can you talk to me about how that's changed the game with how you talk to your players about allowing information out, because it's just so open? COACH BIELEMA: It is. And it probably came to light more so last fall for me than anything. We constantly monitor -- used to be Facebook. We have to monitor that. And making kids understand and realize that anything they put out there in their personal life or anything beyond that is going to become public knowledge. So that was the -- Facebook was a warm-up for tweet. But I think it came full circle when I kind of let it be known that during fall camp last year I was going to give them an evening off. And I let them know that a couple days in advance if guys wanted to make plans to go home. And we were in camp grinding pretty hard. Well, by following some of our players' Twitter page, we found they were going to be attending a concert in Milwaukee, about an hour and a half drive from Madison. So my point was to these guys, hey, if I'm giving you time off, I don't need you out there running around -- I don't know what's going to go on at a concert. I had a good idea it wasn't going to be a very good thing for a college football player to be doing. So I kind of didn't say anything until I was going to let everybody go that night. Hey, I was reading a couple Twitter pages. How many guys are going to the concert tonight? Didn't get a lot of hands in the air. You've got to realize I have seen five tweets where you guys are going to be involved. That's when they caught on they needed to be careful on what I knew. But on the same side, today's world is so different. If I have to get ahold of a kid, I don't call him; I text him. NCAA puts several rules on what we can do with recruits, but it's just a much easier way of communicating, especially with kids that are so adapt and technology is their friend. So I don't put any parameters. I point out stupid tweets when I see one. I had a freshman who played no role in a game that we won last year early in the season, and his tweet was simply: Yeah, that's right, we did it again. I'm like, I read it, I read the author, and everybody hazed him for about the next hour, so that eliminated any stupid texting, tweeting. But it's kind of every coach is a little bit different. Q. You've dealt with the high expectations before. Do you reference that with the players? And do you talk about how maybe this will have to be different this year? COACH BIELEMA: Yeah, going back to 2008, we had some high expectations. We're fortunate enough to start the year off right and ran into a little bit of a slide early on in the season. I did like the fact that we responded. But even when we went 12-1 my first year, I guess 2006, I very seldom ever referenced that season again with our guys because what's history is history. We all learn from it we can read about it but it does nothing to affect the future. I do like the fact that our kids, the majority of our players that are going to be significant players in this year's senior class, all went through the scars of that season themselves in addition to myself and several of my coaching staff. So, yeah, we'll make note of any mistakes that were made that year. But, again, the 2010 season is based on the individuals that are in that room and we'll just kind of move ourselves forward. Q. When you get together with other coaches this week, is the first topic: Will there be more expansion or how the divisions are going to be drawn up or something else? COACH BIELEMA: You know what? I ran into Fitz. I haven't ran into many other coaches. I don't think so. When you come into this meeting, as coaches, you're going to be locked -- we come to camp next Sunday, and I think everybody in this room, unless somebody else has some meetings that I'm not aware of, they don't ask us. At least they don't ask me. Maybe that's just a personal thing. But they're going to make those decisions and move themselves forward. I love just the excitement of trying to find things out and figure it out. I haven't really spent a lot of time assessing what I think it's going to be. It's more how it's going to affect us. I love the expansion of Nebraska for one reason: To me, it opens up more recruiting possibilities to the west. And in addition to the ability to recruit more into the Minnesota and Dakotas and Nebraska itself, it might open up more channels to the West. And also just brings the value of our league. You add Nebraska -- I grew up in an era and an age where it was always on TV and somebody was always playing in a championship game. And, you know, personally, for me, it just brings so much value to our conference that you can't buy anything like that. Q. Heading into the last three seasons, you faced a lot of uncertainty at the quarterback position. What's it like this year having a veteran coming back and coming off a really good year? COACH BIELEMA: It's very -- as a head coach it's an unbelievable feeling to know that answer's already there. And to have that answer be Scott Tolzien, for any of you that's interviewed Scotty, he's a perfectionist, he's a detail guy. I think as a person he's really grown even from a year ago to where we are today so much. He's got unbelievable confidence. His personality. I do believe one of the things that he really struggled with a year ago he was so successful in high school, academically and athletically he never had experienced failure. He never experienced anything that kind of was a bump in the road. When we had a couple of those it really took him back. And he's really done a good job of observing. I thought the best quote I saw him from out of season was somebody asked him about what he learned during the winter film studies, and he said: I'm just finally happy that the guy on film is me. I thought that was an interesting perspective, because he's speaking the truth. He got to watch himself perform in the pressures that were involved, and hopefully it's made him a better player. Q. Any thoughts of adding a conference championship game? And what are the positives and negatives of having a permanent location for that game? COACH BIELEMA: You know, myself, before I went to the Big 12 conference I had been a player in this league. You only know what you know. And a lot of times coaches brainwash kids, I'm not saying I do, but a lot of people do. And one of the things you really felt is you had a certain way of doing things in the conference that was the best way to do it. And then when I went to the Big 12 conference and had an opportunity to play in the Big 12 championship game, earn a BCS berth because we beat Oklahoma who was the No. 1 team in the country, it gave us an opportunity to get into that BCS game, play your way into it. It was an exciting time in our program not just the game itself but the two weeks leading into it, the buildup of trying to get to that game. We lost two games early on in the fall season that we felt the only way we could get to a BCS game was to get to the Big 12 championship game and then beat the Southern opponent, which we did. I was very excited, but I distinctly remember coming into this conference -- I can't believe it's five years now -- as a head coach. And I remember the first time we talked about championship games and if it was something we really wanted to have. And the coaching guard was a little bit different then. Coach Lloyd Carr was the head coach of Michigan and he had traditionally been a Michigan way of thinking and the way that it had always been. Of course, the longstanding programs kind of always -- but one of the people that really liked the championship game idea was myself and Coach Zook, because we'd both been involved in it in different conferences. I'm in favor of it. I don't know where it's going to go. But for me personally I think it would be a very exciting thing. Q. I wanted to ask you, is it true that you've approached league officials about possibly playing Nebraska in the league finale every season? COACH BIELEMA: Well, again, that was the use of the Twitter generation. And one of the things that I tweeted -- actually, we tried to schedule Nebraska two years ago. It was Coach Alvarez, because of his history and tradition of playing at Nebraska, thought it would be a neat cross-over game for us. We were trying to get a home and home as a nonconference schedule, and it really excited me. I know Bo was actually the GA when I was a player at Iowa, so Coach Pelini and I have a little bit of history and shared a common group of friends. Then when this came to life, when it was true that we were going to be adding Nebraska, I tweeted it right away and I followed it up with a text to Mark Rudner and asked for that to be taken into consideration. I'm sure he was inundated and took five seconds to delete the text, but it was something I felt strongly about. And I thought it would be neat. So that's all there is to it. THE MODERATOR: Thank you, Coach. End of FastScripts |
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