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BIG 12 CONFERENCE MEDIA DAYS

July 26, 2011

Tommy Tuberville

DALLAS, TEXAS

THE MODERATOR: We're joined by coach Tommy Tuberville from Texas Tech. Your thoughts of the upcoming season.
COACH TUBERVILLE: Excited to be back here. Second year. Last year was a pain. They always are the first year being in a new situation. It takes a good year to get everything settled, get all your coaches moved in, get their wives off your back. Do all those things, makes you more comfortable.
Then selling your program and your philosophy to all of your fans and your alumni and your players. Getting recruiting going. That's the big thing. When you move in, you're a long way behind. You recruit kids now for three years, and I thought we held our own this past year in recruiting in terms of getting the type of players it's going to take for us to have a chance to win a championship, kind of mix in with some of the older players that we have.
Last year, kind of like a dream. Your first year as you go through it and you've got so many situations that you try to correct or make better, and we held our head above water.
We won eight games. Won a bowl game. It wasn't a great year, but it was a year I think that we can look back on and say, you know, that was the start of something good.
I'm really proud of our seniors. They're the ones that take the brunt of a new coaching staff coming in because they only have a few months to adapt and change everything and make the best of what's there. After the bowl game I told them that they will be remembered for having to go through a very tough situation, which, again, always happens.
But we've got our feet on the ground. We're getting better. Did make one change in our defense this past year, after going through a year and watching what we have to play against, the type of players, the type of coaches, going back to a four-man front instead of a three-man front, a little bit because we'll have more personnel to do that.
And I think there's two things that you need in this league after watching all the teams play: You have to have a very good pass rusher coming from the outside, and you have to have two good corners.
And if you have those, you've got a chance in this league to keep somebody under 21 points, which is still a lot of points. If you don't, you've got no chance. You better outscore them.
So we're not where we want to be on either side of the ball. We've got, I think, more speed coming this year. We have our offensive line back. We'll have all new skilled players on offense. It will be kind of hit and miss for a while. Defensively we'll have seven new starters.
Mostly from high school and junior college ranks or redshirt freshmen from last year. We'll be a team that you won't know many of the players the first few games.
And hopefully we can have some consistency, work through the first part of the season without injuries. We had eight surgeries last year in the first month. That wasn't good. Especially with the depth that we had.
So I'm excited. We've got a chance to be fairly good, just depends on how we pick things up as we go through the year. We have an open date our second game, which I don't really like, but we play our three non-conference games early. We go 11 straight games without an open date. It's going to be a long season in terms of having to play different guys, but I'm excited about that, and look forward to the second year. Questions?

Q. You talked about the defensive changes. Obviously the system that Chad brings in this 4-2-5 is what he used at TCU talk about how much you think it will take your players to get used to that but part of what made it successful for them was having a bunch of depth there.
COACH TUBERVILLE: Yeah, it's all about depth and speed on defense. You don't really have to worry about size. You worry about quickness and speed. I've always believed in that anyway. That's the type of defense I've been around.
The thing I like about the 4-2-5 pretty much we ran a lot of it last year, it forces you in this league with the type of players that you play against and the formations, you have to run a lot of nickel defenses, and that's pretty much what a 4-2-5 is, is four-man front, two linebackers and five defensive backs. We ran that 95 percent of the time last year.
So really not a lot of difference other than the fact that we're going to base out of it more, we'll be able to do a few more things out of it. We'll still run some three-man front, but the whole philosophy of defense is getting as many on the field in defense that you can run as much as possible, fast as possible. You play Oklahoma, you play Texas A&M last year, they just run you down.
And it kind of reminds me of defenses I've been part of when we've had good success. That's how you win championships. It's not with anything else other than the speed on defense. To give your offense an opportunity not to have to score 100 points to win a game.
And that's the mode that we want to get into. And then having depth on defense. We're very short last year. We had to play a receiver in a game at receiver, and then we also had to play in the corner back during the game.
So in college football, if you have two platoon guys, you're not going to have a lot of success. So this year I don't think we'll have to do that. We'll have more depth, we'll have more speed. And unfortunately most of it will be inexperience. But the good thing is they'll be with us for a while.

Q. A lot of people around Fort Worth and TCU were disappointed when Texas Tech decided to move out of its game against TCU this fall. What was the decision behind it, and is there any truth to the perception that you wanted out of that game because you just didn't think you guys could win it right now the way the team's presently constructed?
COACH TUBERVILLE: A little bit of that as a coach. But the thing about it is we had four nonconference teams scheduled. And because the new conference realignment, one had to go.
But I've been in this business a while. Obviously for us we're going to be a very young team coming in. Gary's done a great job. He's done an excellent job of bringing in players and building depth and building consistency.
That's really probably not the type of team we want to play right now. Not that we didn't want to play them. It was obvious that we had somebody had to go in that slot where they were at, you know, pretty much fit what we needed to do.
If they had been in another slot maybe in one of the other non-conference positions, we would have still been playing that game. But somebody had to go.
And, again, hopefully we can play -- I think that's a natural game for us. I think we need to play that game. I think it needs to be a home and home game, and I think that it would help both Gary and us to play each year.

Q. Coach, given Seth Doege's experience or lack of it over the last I guess five years now, how comfortable are you with him getting the job done?
COACH TUBERVILLE: You know, it's still going to be a battle in two-a-days. I thought Jacob Karam made as much progress last year as anybody did on our football team in the spring. He's our backup quarterback.
Seth is a coach's son. He's been around. He's been through a lot of adversities, persevered through two knee injures. He's the first one at the office every day, workout, lift weights. He gets receivers to practice. He wants to be the guy. He's passionate about football.
If you're not passionate about college football, then you're not going to be a success. Now, you might be pretty good at it, but you're not going to be as good as you could be, and he's passionate about it. Not to say that our other quarterbacks aren't. They are. They work very hard.
But Seth is -- he probably could have been our quarterback last year. Potts and Sheffield were injured in the first spring practice in my first spring year. Seth got all the snaps along with Jacob Karam, and Seth really knew the offense going into last fall better than Potts and Sheffield because he had more practice time in what we were doing.
So it's not going to be a quarterback by committee. Seth is our number one guy, and going into two-a-days he'll be in that situation, not to say it won't change as we go through two-a-days or even through the season.
But I just like his leadership skills. I like his passion for football, his being around his dad who was offensive coordinator head coach for several years. He's been a gym rep, and they usually turn out to be good quarterbacks.

Q. Last year before you ever coached a game you got your butt in a sling with some comments about the conference. Now we've had about a year of tranquility, until the last couple of years, some things have sort of bubbled up again, what are your thoughts about the future of the conference?
COACH TUBERVILLE: I think it's good. I said a few things last year. And, of course, I believe that. I wish we still had Nebraska and we still had Colorado. I think it was a very good conference. But it still is. We've got a chance to continue to build on what has been here for a long time. There's a lot of good teams in this league. We're a balanced league. Anybody can beat anybody. There's some good coaches in this league. A lot of good players. A lot of All-Americans, lot of Heisman Trophy winners and traditions, national champions.
I think the one thing we'll miss, everybody will miss, fans, not just our fans in the Big 12, but across the country, is that championship game.
I know it -- I was an opponent against that for the years of starting in the SEC when I was there, but once you get in that game and get it going and then see the ramifications of the money and the notoriety that you get, it's good for everybody involved.
I've had a chance to coach in that a few times when I was in the SEC, but it's hard to get there. And then the way that the national championship figures out, it's going to probably work in our advantage. If somebody can run the table in the Big 12, they'll probably have a great opportunity to play in the championship, national championship game without playing that extra game.
So it won't be the first time, though. There's been other teams that's made it without a championship game. But it's going to be a strong league. Everybody playing everybody is going to be a true conference champion. I don't know what the future is, but I don't think there's any doubt we can sustain with ten teams and we can make the best out of it and even become a stronger conference maybe than what it was. That's a political answer, right (laughter)?
THE MODERATOR: Thank you.

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