OPENING STATEMENT:
"Coming off a bye week is an important week for us. I made a comment to our football team that sometimes bye weeks can be really good. But, they also can back fire for you too if you don't get yourself ready to play. Oregon had a really tough opponent in Cal. They (Oregon) were playing at home and the score was 7-0. So, I tried to give them a warning. A bye week gets you rested up, but you have got to get into the mode playing football again. That is kind of what hurts you on the bye week. It happens in the NFL as well. Players and coaches love it because you get to look at yourself, you evaluate your team and all the things you like to do better. But at the end, emotionally, there is a little bit of a letdown because you are used to playing and preparing every week. Now we have missed a week of that and we have got to start preparing for a really good opponent, especially offensively. They average about 44 points a game, they do a good job on third-down, they keep the ball and they score a lot of points. These guys have scored 224 points - they have a way of getting the ball in the end zone. They do not like punting a lot, they have 11 punts all season. That tells you kind of offense they are. Defensively, they made a bit of a change. I do not know exactly what they are going to be. The players do not change. I am sure they are in good hands when you make a change like that. It always kind of brings shock waves to your football team. Knowing this team and in their pedigree, these guys have won on average nine games in the last 3 years. Coach (Mike) Leach has done a marvelous job up there of creating an atmosphere of winning. They know how to win. They have had two tough losses. I told our football team that they will come in here and be at their best. So, we better be prepared for that when we play them.”
ON WHETHER PLAYERS RALLY TOGETHER OR JUST FEEL AS IF IT IS AN ADJUSTMENT PERIOD AFTER A COACH LEAVES:
"I have never been part of that one. I don't know if it was mutual agreement. That is what Coach (Mike Leach) said, so that is what I will believe. But, I have never been a part of that. In football there are is always changes, some of them happen in the middle of the season and some of them happen at the end of the year. I think players are accustomed to that. I have never been around college football when something like this happens in the middle of the season. These are young people. How they handle that emotionally is a little bit different probably than the guys playing on Sunday because that happens frequently. I have always said if you are worried about getting fired, then do not be a coach. It is a matter of when it happens. A lot of times it has nothing to do with you being a good coach because a lot of really good coaches have been let go or gone in another direction. That is just part a it. I think these young guys will rally. They have lost two in a row. That alone makes you say, ‘look, we want to win a game again.' Like I said, this is very prideful team. A lot of guys have been there and have won a lot of games. I don't know if anybody's going undefeated in the last five years probably in both divisions, north or south. You can lose two and still have a shot to win your conference. If you lose three, then that is tough. That is tough sledding in the conference. This is what I am learning in my second year. Looking at it going through dissecting it knowing what it's going to take to win on your side, if you lose three, it will be tough. Every once in a while, you might have a weird season where every team is kind of beating up on everybody you might get three. So, I just think that's where we are at right now."
ON WHAT MAKES IT DIFFICULT TO STOP WASHINGTON STATE’S AIR RAID OFFENSE AND KEEPING THEM UNDER CONTROL:
“If you keep them under control, they will move the ball still. They spread you out and use every blade of grass on the field. They attack you inside the numbers a lot with the type of routes they run. Their quarterback (Anthony Gordon) is a very poised guy. He is very accurate. You can go two ways against these guys. Some people bring pressure and bring five or six guys to try to make him get the ball out of his hand. When you do that, you have to be able to tackle in space. That is the whole key. They put you in space. Their athletes against your athletes and their quarterback spreads ball around. There are about seven or eight receivers that have about 18 to 20 receptions has a whole so it is not just one guy. He does not get hit a lot because the ball is gone, they make you react to that. So, you can pressure him or you can drop eight. If you drop eight, then he would be able to stand back there all day. He is not going to run a whole lot, but he can buy himself some time. Now, you have to plaster your receiver. You have to have a different mindset when you play against him because he gets the ball out so fast. That is the difficulty of it all."
ON HOW YOUR LEADERSHIP STYLES CHANGED FROM PRO TO COLLEGE LEVEL:
“In terms of leadership styles from for me, I do not know if I have changed that much to be quite honest. I try to just tell them like how it is and tell them the truth. I do not sugarcoat things. I am always the guy that lets players know where they stand and what they need to do to improve because players that are motivated to being as good as they can be are motivated to improve. You want to have a platform and a culture where they have an opportunity to do that. I think we have established that here when you look at all the young guys in play, but I also know that in life people like consequences. The ones that do not can never improve. If you do not know the consequences, then there is no line. There is a line in life that you cannot cross. If you cross it, the there are consequences and I think the players understand that I do not believe in belittling players or coaches. I do it my way. It is usually with a conversation in my office. I tell them what I expect out of them. I expect certain things out of people. That is just me. I got that from my parents. There are certain things you do. You act a certain way, you do things the right way. When I took this job, everybody was saying what I am old school, right? No, I am right school. I just do what is right, and right has never been wrong it is always right. That's how life works. Life is not complicated. Coaching is not complicated. Whether you are coaching in the Under Armor All-American Game when these guys were in high school about to go to college. Whether your are coaching a professional football player, players want consistency. Whoever is talking to him, they want them to be consistent. If you are consistent, they listen. If you are not consistent and you waiver, they go wait a minute now. He is sending different messages. My message is very clear. It starts with me, how I act, and how I go about doing my business. I think I have earned their respect that they will get the type of consistency out of me whether we win or we lose. I am going to be the same guy every day. I think players are comfortable with that. I was that way as a player. I had a taskmaster as a head coach in professional football. His name was Dick Vermeil. I love the guy like my dad because he was he was consistent, you understood what he expected. And you just said okay, 'If I do this, I am good.’ I think players just want consistency. Can you help them get better? We build our whole foundation on helping players get better. We want to maximize their talent because we cannot give them talent. I say it all the time that God gives them talent. We have to make sure they do not waste it.”
ON DILLON-STERLING COLE NOT ENTERING TRANSFER PORTAL:
“He is comfortable with the fact that it was competition and we never tried to stack the deck against him. We were honest. We told him that he can continue to play quarterback, but that he can have a role on this football team to help us win games. He wants to help us win games. No different than Ethan (Long). Ethan came in here as a quarterback. He still plays quarterback sometimes but, he understands this is his role. I think when you are honest with guys, they may not like the decision you made as a coach, but they had an opportunity, which they all had opportunities now, eventually someone would break out even with four quarterbacks. How do you get the reps? Can you deal with one person being the guy? A lot of players in today's world, because of the portal, do not want to deal with that. I give him credit. It says a lot about who he is and he has been great with the players. He has been fabulous. Anything I have asked him to do, he would do. Can you do it this weekend or play as this player during practice. He has been good with all the players. I remember the first day of practice when he went over to the scout team. He told everyone that their job was to make the defense better. That is a credit to him and who he is. It is always good to see a guy like that."
ON PREPARATION COMING OFF OF BYE WEEK:
“It is tough, coaches always struggle with byes. Coaches and players love byes, but you get out of the mode of playing football. They would have had a bye too. So, we are in the same boat. This is a prideful football team that has won a lot of football games over the last three years, so they understand where they are at right now. They need to win. We need to win too. I know they are going to be at their best. We need to make sure we are at our best because this is the Pac-12. Every week, there is a head-scratching result. You watch the games being played out and it just makes you scratch your head and go, how did this happen? Stanford, prideful football team with one of the best coaches in the Pac-12 and in the country as far as I'm concerned, lost a couple games. They were playing with a backup quarterback and the whole nine yards. They were playing against a really good football team and they found a way to win. That is what is unique about this conference. Every week, you scratch your head and say, ‘how did that happen.’ That is football."
ON INJURY REPORT AND MIKE LEACH'S COACHING STYLE:
“The injury part, guys are getting healed up. We had some guys with some bumps and bruises and every team has that. Going into the season, certain guys need to rest and we were able to give certain guys some rest this week. They all participated yesterday, they were all back practicing, which is good. Nothing serious, Kobe (Williams) had the hand (injury) and had to get surgery. But he practiced yesterday, he is good to go, he is ready to play. Coach Leach, I have watched him from afar and I am marveled about how he goes about his business. He does it his way, what I like about the guy, he knows who is and his players know who he is. There is a consistency about the way he coaches. All I know is one thing, wherever he has been, they score a lot of points. I have had some conversations with him, passing. He welcomed me when I got hired here when we had the coaches meetings, he welcomed me to the Pac-12. I have seen him from afar, talked to him a couple times and very bright guy. He knows football, he knows a lot about football and they always score, I know that. They always score points and when you play his teams you better be ready. They are going to figure it out and they know how to attack defenses because they have seen every defense imaginable with this offense. They see people bring pressure, see people drop eight back, they have seen people drop nine back and rush two, they have seen it all. There is nothing that we can do that he is going to look at. He is good at adjusting and you have to be able to adjust when he adjusts and that is going to be the cat-and-mouse game we are going to have to play.”
ON BRANDON RUIZ STATUS:
“His status is that he is still not kicking. When we came back to work, he felt a little twinge again. So he is out, he is still out, that is where he is at right now. We know who our kicker is and we are going with our guy. Good for him, the more he kicks, the more confident he becomes. He does not have the leg but he has been pretty accurate. He missed the two (vs. Cal). But I trust the guy, he is a hard worker and he is earning his scholarship now because he is kicking and that is okay.”
ON PRESSURE TO MAINTAIN TEAM’S AP RANKING:
“We have not handled success very well when we get ranked. How do we handle it? How do all these young guys handle all that stuff? I did not know that, that is new to me. I live in a bubble, but we are going to have to prepare and play. Rankings do not help you win games, they are nice because of the fans. But it does not mean anything until the end, until the season is over with, then what are you ranked? What bowl game are you playing in, to me all of that other stuff is stuff. It does not mean a whole lot to me, it is all the same. Now, if you are one of those teams that are always No. 1, No. 2 or No. 3, knowing Nick (Saban), he does not worry about that stuff. Some of those teams every year, according to who you are, you are always going to be in the top-five. Every year, when the season starts, they are going to project certain teams in the top-five. Is there pressure on them? Yeah, but they are used to it and live in it, it is normal. I would hope eventually when we build this program that it would be normal. That it will not be a conversation, ‘oh yeah,” okay so what, who cares. That is what you want, quite honest, that is something I always looked at with good teams. When you are a good team, you don’t worry about that, just keep playing. It should not be any pressure on you, it should be more of that it is normal. Maybe one day, down the road as we continue to develop and continue to get better and put this thing together, we will feel like you do not have to ask that question anymore. Instead of it being a surprise, we are not anywhere near that.”
ON HOW THE FRESHMAN ARE COMING ALONG:
“It is like the NFL, they told me after my second game, you are not a rookie anymore and they are right. After awhile, when you become the starter and you play, that is who you are. The thing they do not have but continue to get is experience, only way you get it is if you play. Every week to them is a different week, a different opponent. A lot of these guys have not played the opponent. Well now, you are going to play them. You learn more about your football team, they learn more about themselves. Last year we hit a wall for the young guys because they are playing against seniors and juniors that have experience. Some of them are bigger and stronger because they have been in the weight room for three years and Merlin (Robertson), (Darien) Butler and Aashari (Crosswell) that had to play early, even (Jermayne) Lole, those guys on defense, they wore down a little bit because of the physicalness of the game of football and you anticipate that too, that is why it was good that we had a bye. Some people do not look at that part, but I look at that part, I look at physical part of it. These guys are playing against seniors and juniors every week that are really good football players and this guy, just got out of high school. He is asked to play at that level for twelve weeks and they wear down some, they just do. That is the experience they have to go through.”
ON WHERE THE DEFENSIVE BACKS ARE AT RIGHT NOW:
“We have not intercepted enough balls, in my opinion and I told them that. We are better than that. They still struggle a lot with dirty eyes, they are looking at things they should not look at and that is the hardest thing about playing back there. You either have clean eyes or dirty eyes and generally, dirty eyes are not good, because something bad is about to happen. The way the ball is in the air in college football, even pro-football, they are going to catch some balls on you. That is just part of it, we cannot sit here saying they are not going to catch it. Yeah they are going to catch balls on you, they just do, that is the way it works. But, does one catch affect you mentally, does it bother you, do you get out of wack and where all of sudden, now you guess. Trying to make a play and then there is two plays, now you know it, there are three plays. Before you know it, it is a bad quarter. Before you know it, it is a bad game. I have always said this, because I played the position, you have to have selective memory. It has to be selective and when the play is done, it is done. You cannot dwell on it, you cannot guess, you come over to the sideline and we fix it. We tell you what you did and did not do. But for me right now, we do not play with clean eyes, we just do not. We are trying to see too much and when you do that, things get distorted and you don’t play the ball correctly. We have to improve, we should take the ball away more. We have caused a lot of fumbles but we have not intercepted the ball and got our hands on enough balls in my opinion.”
ON HBO DISTRACTIONS AFFECTING THE TEAM:
“Once they get in the building, nothing distracts us. It is how do you handle all the stuff outside the building. That is the whole key of prioritizing what you do everyday. One thing we understand in college football, no different than pro-football, we have them for twenty-hours and what do they do when they leave the building. When you win, like anything else, you gain more friends. They become more popular, how do you handle all of that? I do not know. How do you handle people telling you, ‘great game, that was a great win.’ All of them are different. Everybody is different, they cannot be like me. I am a whole different cat when it comes to that stuff. I really do not care. All I care about is preparing myself and preparing this football team to win a game, that is all I worry about. When that game is over and by the time I hit that tunnel, I am on to next week. I will deal with interviews after the game, talk to the press like I am supposed to do and try to give them everything I can about what happened in the game and I have moved on. Time I get in my office, I am already thinking about next week. Marvin (Lewis) already has the scouting report on them next week. I get in here the next day and I start looking, okay, here we go. They are a little bit different, all we can do is try to make them focus when we get them on what is at hand. Yesterday, pretty good practice, they ran around and had a little bit of something in them. Now we have to do it again and again, but that is the part of college football."