Aug. 26, 2010
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Opening statement: We got some exciting news to start with today in our quest to continue to schedule national games and try to find locations that are fun for our fans and challenging for our team. We’ve been able to schedule a home and home with the University of Southern California. So we will be going to Southern California and playing USC there in 2017, and they will return to a game in Austin in 2018, so it should be a lot of fun and something that I know our players will be excited about and the future. I applaud DeLoss [Dodds] and Butch Worley for going out and really working to get our schedule back on track and it’s especially challenging for them when you’ve got the Big 12 schedule changing and they’re trying to figure out who do you play next year? If they go to a nine-game schedule, you have to take somebody off and that’s always very, very difficult when you’re this late.
We’ll close preseason camp today with practice this afternoon and then the women’s clinic tonight. The women’s clinic is always fun because you’ve got nearly 1,000 women in there that are coaching and trying to learn more about football than their husbands and that’s fun for them.
The guys will practice today, they’ll meet for the practice today, they’ll meet in the morning at 6 a.m. with the coaches, they’ll be off Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and we will meet with them for a team meeting on Sunday night for dinner and then we’ll practice Monday morning at 6 a.m. and start our preparation for Rice. We still have the exact same times for our press conference on Monday because the guys will be through.
Today’s a fun day but a tough day for a lot of guys. Yesterday the freshmen started class for the first day and had a long scrimmage last night and then today they come back and between now and Monday we have to finalize the depth chart, so some guys may not see that they’re in the mix today. They may not feel like they’re going to travel to Rice. They may feel like some of their dreams are broken. A younger one may beat an older one out so we’re in the process over the next three or four days of talking to all the guys about where they fit and that obviously affects team morale and team chemistry and as disappointing as it is for some, it’s really exciting for others. It is a very difficult time for a football team. They’ve all worked and they’ve worked very hard and some are more disappointed today.
We continue to be excited about this freshman class. We think everyone in this class has a chance to play before they leave. Some of them have asked us if they could redshirt because they’d like to because they may not get enough playing time. Always the needs of the team supersede the individual desires of a player, so we have to look at that and have to wait, really, until midseason and tell them to keep working. We’ll redshirt you if you possibly can but if you have two injuries at a certain position, you may not be able to redshirt so we’re constantly looking at that. I’ve been really excited that as hard as we’ve pushed this team, it’s harder on the freshmen because a lot of them are planning on playing, but a concern you have is when an older player sees a younger player taking some of his playing time away or maybe replacing him, it can really be sensitive for a team. So far, the older ones have handled it really well. In fact they’ve stepped up and helped us coach the younger ones and that’s been fun for us to watch.
Last night’s scrimmage was exactly what we wanted. We had nearly 90 plays, we had 30 plays ones against ones, it was very competitive and it was fun to see those two compete. We’re getting better on both sides of the ball simply because we’ve got a really good offense playing a really good defense right now and something has to give every time. We’re in a position where we played the two against the two for another 30 and we kept the young ones out for 10 or 1`5 plays after that and let them play and then the rest were kicking situations that will come up during the game, but it was very physical and no significant injuries that should keep someone from playing against Rice next week.
Tray Allen and D.J. Grant will not play next week. They’re still in a position where they’ll be evaluated each week but they’re not near ready to play at this point so I would think it would be at least down the road in the season before they play. Demarco Cobbs and Tevin Jackson will not be released to play yet either. Tevin’s wrist has been re-aggravated so it’s really bothering him from a break in an all-star game and Demarco’s just had a mess with his hamstring. He just can’t get it well, so those guys will not be available to play next week. There’s a few other guys that we’re still looking at, but everybody else, we feel like, should be released and ready to play. In preseason camp you get so many little injuries and we’ve talked about that some that you’ll have a pull here, you’ll have a sore ankle there, you’ll have a sore shoulder, but it’s not something that will keep them out, it’s just something that we keep them from participating because there’s so many practices and so much hitting in preseason.
Paden Kelley will not make the trip next week. He broke team rules so he and Vondrell McGee will not make the trip and then they’d both be back competing and ready to play against Wyoming.
I did want to touch a couple of things with NCAA rules that have changed just so you’ll be aware of them. There will be no more media guides sent out after this year. They’ll all be online so we will not have media guides available for you. We can’t send them to the high school players or high school coaches anymore. This was the last year and you could not send them out after August 1, so all of that, which is disappointing for me because I know a lot of people love to read the media guides and the kids love to keep them, but that’s something that the NCAA has done away with them so we will never see another media guide with the NCAA.
Also, there’s been a lot of talk about early offers and such. They did change a rule that until August 1, you cannot send a written offer to any high school student-athlete and on August 1, you can only send it to an upcoming senior, so there will be no more letters written to sophomores and juniors offering them scholarships because you can no longer do that. The offer will have to come on August 1 of their senior year. Nothing has been done verbally, you can still offer the way I understand it, but you cannot send a written offer to the high school player.
We’re really excited this weekend that we’ve got Lake Travis [High School] and Westlake [High School] opening up in DKR and that’s fun for us. At the same time, the NCAA, because it’s in a non-evaluation and non-contact period, has told us we cannot be in the building or at the game, so I can be in my office I guess now because I can’t see it, so they didn’t say not in the building but we cannot see the ballgame, our coaching staff or anyone who is related to football staff, so Jeff Madden, Cleve Bryant, none of those administrators can see the game so we will not be around to see it in person.
A couple of playing rules that are significant changes just for you as well, I think the biggest one is that they’re going to the NFL rule that you cannot form a wedge on kickoff return. The wedge would be determined or identified as no more than two players can be shoulder to shoulder within two yards of each other during the return. We had a meeting with an official yesterday and obviously if you’ve got two players over here and two players over here, they’re not shoulder to shoulder so it’s not a wedge and if they all come together as you’re coming and get close to each other, they said that would not be a violation of the rule, they’re talking about starting together. The interesting part of that, if they called a penalty, it’s a 15-yard penalty on the kickoff from where the contact occurred or it’s half the distance to the goal. So if you return it to the 20[-yard line] and you have a wedge violation, it goes back to the 10[-yard line], so it can be a significant penalty on kickoff. The other thing that’s interesting about the rule, if it’s kicked out, if it’s a touchback, you cannot have a penalty called on the rule so I guess it’s not a wedge if it’s kicked out, so I didn’t understand that but that’s what we were told.
Also, there will be continued emphasis on targeting a defenseless player in the head or neck area, so even if you hit on the shoulder-pad area and your helmet goes up and hits the player in the neck or face area, they can still call it as a 15-yard penalty so that’s really, really difficult to call. It’s a tough call and it’s a 15-yard penalty and an automatic first down. So if it’s third-and-30 and one of your players hits a player quote, "in the neck or head area," and they call it illegal, it’s an automatic first down and 15 yards, so it is a significant penalty, again.
The other one they’ve tightened up on some is if an offensive player that’s split out, a flex tight end, a wide receiver, at anytime if he blocks below the waist back towards the ball inside of a 10-yard area, the again, it’s a 15-yard penalty. So if there’s a defensive back inside of a wide receiver, I mean two yards, and the wide receiver goes and cuts him and he is inside of the receiver, that’s still going to be a 15-yard penalty if it is within a 10-yard radius.
We had a great meeting the other night and you all know that we awarded two scholarships and to award those scholarships it has to be unanimous by our staff. They’re obviously one-year scholarships, but John Gold and Tyrell Higgins got scholarships and the players were really excited about them, but at the same time, they came up with their little slogan this year and it’s "Every play, every day.” They know that this team is young, we have a lot of question marks and we can take no lazy steps. We have to come out and play as hard as we can every play, every day and that’s their slogan.
On Sam Acho’s leadership: Sam is such a bright young man. When I met with him in high school, he told me he had two goals for his college career – he wanted to be a football all-American and an academic all-American. He’s already become an academic all-American, he’s working hard on the football part of it, and he’s such a great young man, he’s such a giving person off the field, that gives him great leadership qualities on the field.
On the benefits of having a conference championship game: The benefits of having a conference championship game, some people would think that it’s an easier way to separate a tie, especially if not everybody plays everybody else. In our case, it looks like everybody will play everybody else so it should be a defined champion, but if you’ve got 12, you can’t play everybody. Secondly, a couple of years ago, and the only time I remember it, Florida really gained extra points and jumped maybe Michigan. Michigan-Ohio State were playing, Ohio State beat Michigan, Florida was playing somebody, Florida beat them, Michigan dropped to third, Florida dropped to second and without that game they wouldn’t have had a strong enough schedule to do it. That’s the only time I remember a conference championship-game win putting someone in the National Championship game.
On the benefits of not having a conference championship game: I think everybody plays everybody else so that’s a good thing in my estimation – you have a clear champion. The other way you can have a lesser schedule one year because it just falls that you don’t play the two best teams in the league that one year and you have an easier route to the championship. If you’ve got one side of the league that’s much stronger than the other and the games during the league in their division are much bigger games than the championship game, that kind of fizzles at the end because you’d like to have a splash at the end and that’s probably it. The negative is that you want to have a presence on that weekend for recruiting because it’s a big weekend when everybody’s playing a championship game and the other thing is you’d rather not have two months between your last game and the National Championship game and they’ve moved that game back so far now that’s a concern for all of us. You really have to manage practicing for a month or a month in a half.
On the maturity of the freshman class: It’s a bright group. It’s a smart group. We’re trying to do a better job recruiting and trying to find maturity instead of just a good athlete. We’re working really, really hard to have guys that are more ready for this pressure and so far in this class we’re excited about it. They’re not all perfect, but they are trying really hard and I’ve been amazed, usually you have somebody wanting to quit and go home and we haven’t had that. They’ve worked real hard.
On this freshman class being more ready to play than previous freshman classes: I think so. Very honestly, today we’re really talking about depth chart at length for the first time because you usually know who’s going to start at 50, 60, 70 percent of the positions by now, but you’ve still got some that are either-ors and you’ve still got some that may need to compete next week and play well. You’ve got some that you’d like to see get well and play better, but with this group, what I will do and I was trying t think how to be fair to you all, releasing a depth chart is really hard because we’ve got all the information and you don’t. You just see a name, so there may be a guy that’s second team because he hasn’t been able to practice for 10 days because he’s got a sore ankle and if I don’t sit and go over every player, then it’s confusing to you and you’ll say, ‘Boy, he must not have played well.’ No, he hasn’t practiced in 10 days so what we’ll try to do, is put the freshman in the two-deep that are in it, obviously, but then what I’ll try to do is give you a list of freshmen that we feel like may play next week or may play before the year is over, and then there will be another list that we’re looking at and if they don’t play by the seventh game, then they will be potential redshirts, so we’ll try to be as fair as we can with what we know.
On how many wide receivers will be in the rotation: You usually try to play five, at least five. You’d like to have eight. You’d like to have five or six that are like starters that can rotate in and out because you’ve really got three positions. You’d like to be two-deep with guys that can go in and play, sometimes you can take five and play one guy at two spots so that’s what you have to look at.
On if the new recruiting rule will change how teams are recruiting: I don’t think it will change much. Some parents want a letter because they want to see it in writing. We haven’t done this before, but a lot of teams will send mass mail offering 70 scholarships and see who bites. That will be stopped now.
On the biggest question marks about the team: Experienced depth on the offensive line and the defensive line, experienced depth at quarterback, we’ve got a hard decision to make for the backup quarterback this weekend. It’s something we’ve got to really study and look at and see if we can make that decision by Monday. You want to see your young linemen on both sides of the ball come through, but there are so many young ones competing that it may be the third, fourth, fifth week before we see some of them develop. So we’re not discouraged with some of the young linemen that aren’t ready to play yet because most of it is because they’re a little heavier and they’re not used to hustling every play with the body type they’ve got, so we’re going to let them mature a little bit as we go.
On the depth at the offensive line: We’ve got a group of older guys. We’re really excited about Kyle Hix; he’s a dominant player. Michael Huey is playing with dominance in the preseason. David Snow has played a lot. Britt Mitchell has played some. Other than that you don’t have guys that have played across the board, so that means there will be young and inexperienced guys playing as ones and if that’s the case, there’s definitely inexperience with the twos.
On if the removal of the wedge will lead to more long kick returns: I don’t think it will make any difference. Usually you didn’t have three guys running together and knocking people out anyway. I think it seemed like there was a bigger presence of concussions last year and there are more returns than in the past because there are fewer touchbacks on the kickoffs since we moved the kickoff back five yards. I really feel it’s just that there are more kickoffs and huge collisions. We got Deon Beasley knocked out last year at A&M and it was because he got hit from the side; it was a single block. We had another get knocked out and it wasn’t a wedge play. I just think there are going to be huge collisions on kickoffs as long as there are that many returns. I don’t think it will be an advantage for the cover team. I hope the officials won’t look up at the end and see four guys together and throw the flag when they did everything they were supposed to, but the official just saw it late. That’s the fear I have; it’s a hard one to call. But when you’re running full speed and there are that many collisions out there, it’s hard to tell if they are two or two and a half yards apart, so it’s a tough call for the officials.
On the NCAA’s new rule disallowing cut blocks: The wide receiver cannot cut anyone below the waste. So they have made it much harder for wide receivers to block. If he’s going to block, it has to be head up or on the outside. Usually the rules have been advantageous for the offense. To me, this is a huge advantage for the defense. Now, the safety part of it is evident. They won’t be cutting linebackers legs, but also if you have a bubble screen and a crack back, and a 250-pound linebacker and a 165-pound receiver trying to block him, he is definitely going to cut him, no matter what we said. One advantage we have there is we make them stay up in practice so they cannot cut. So, at least they’re getting work, but I can already see it’s going to be harder in games. It will affect any perimeter plays. Usually your explosive plays on offense are because people are blocking downfield and your receivers are key to perimeter explosive plays, and I think we’ll see fewer. But now we’ve got some big strong safeties, so when those safeties come up, it’ll be harder to block Christian Scott, Blake Gideon, [Kenny] Vaccaro and [Nolan] Brewster.
On the difficulty of making depth chart decisions: We’re trying to sit down over the weekend with each player and say you may not be playing if everyone is healthy this year. It’s not a negative. We would have recruited you again, you’re really good, you’re talented and it’s a blessing for some to be redshirted – it gives you a fifth year of school, another year to grow up. It may be a logjam at certain positions and there’s not room right now. Other than having to say I’m not going to play when they get home Friday night, it’s really a positive for them. I’ve always thought for the ones that play, it means we must have a need for them, so they must be excited, and the ones that redshirt should really be excited because they have a year to grow up and not lose a year. So it’s really a positive on both sides, but it’s difficult for a young guy who has huge dreams and was highly recruited to go home and tell them, "I’m probably not going to play or I’m not going to travel." We have one of the best programs in the country, so not everyone is going to play when they first get here, but at home, in a small town, it may be different. It’s always difficult because you’re affecting someone’s life. Every mother loves her child more than anyone else. When you look at parents, they just want their kids to be happy and that’s fair, but when they’re not playing, they’re not happy and that is a very difficult thing for us.
On Tray Allen’s injury: You never know if it’s something that will be lingering. We had the foot injury with Derek Lokey and it came back fast. We had the foot injury with Mason Walters and it bothered him to a point where he had to wait, so I don’t know. We’re just waiting, and it’s a hard thing. The other thing that is very difficult, for a 300-pound guy like Tray, when you can’t run, you have to do everything in water or do everything on a bike to have to prepare yourself to continue to be in condition. The concern would be that once we get him back, he’s going to have to get in shape, so we’re not encouraged for a quick return.
On the importance of playing in Houston: I love Reliant. These kids are so lucky to be able to play in Reliant, which is one of the best stadiums ever built. To play in Jerry Jones’ stadium last year was unbelievable and for these kids to be able to play in pro venues, I’m pumped about it. The fact that we get to play in Houston is exciting. They said it’s above 50,000, but I’m still banking on 70,000. I know it’s hot, but we’re going to close the roof. I know it is vacation weekend – save your money, come to the game. Take your vacation at Reliant. And I love playing historical games like the old Southwest Conference games; those are fun.
On if playing in Houston helps with recruiting: Absolutely, we’re in the paper there every day, we’re on the TV every day. A lot of the kids that like Texas may even go as Rice recruits because they’re looking at Rice and Texas. I just think its fun for them to see the Longhorns take the field. It is a national TV game and it also sends a message to the Houston kids that we’re going to play in their city, so they’ll be able to play in front of their home crowd.
On Blaine Irby’s injury: He is doing much better. He is running. He is under the watch of our training staff, but he is not in a position to play this year.
On the additions of USC and Notre Dame to the scheduling: We tried to do that when we first got here. We wanted the national games – UCLA, Ohio State, Arkansas. Now that we don’t have a conference championship game, all of us decided that, so people will not question our schedule in the future for the BCS, we’ll go back and make sure we have a national presence. We’re trying to clean up the next two or three years. We’ve got Ole Miss and BYU as new teams to our out-of-conference schedule. But in the future, we’re going to try to make sure we have a presence like this, and I think it’s exciting.
On the possibility of future conference realignment: That was one of the reasons we were so hesitant to schedule before, but we feel that we’ll have a good presence in the Big 12. All we have to do in the Big 12 is make it work. If it works, we stay. If it doesn’t work, then we all have issues anyway. I read that only 14 athletic departments out of the 120 that play Division I football make money. So it has to work with the money for everybody. So if it works for everybody, it works and then the rest of it is fun. That’s why we’re planning on it working. I don’t think you stay with a conference thinking it’s not going to work.
On the development of the running game: We’re in a three-point stance, and we’re coming downhill and coming off the ball. It’s no doubt that it is easier to run the ball in a three-point stance rather than a two-point stance. In our experience, it’s easier to run the ball when the quarterback is under center and the running back is right behind him. He can go three ways – he can bounce outside, cut back or go straight ahead. We had more explosive plays with the quarterback under the center compared to the shotgun. And at the same time, we want to keep our presence in the shotgun and still throw the ball. We are not going to be stubborn to a point that we’re going to go out there and run into nine-man lines. We can throw the ball. We want to be able to run it better than we have been the past three years, and that is what I’m seeing. Play-action gets you a lot more deep balls. It’s easier run the ball under center with the linemen in a three-point stance, and at the same time it’s harder to pass protect when you are in a three-point stance for play-action. So you have to do a great job running the ball and selling the fake, so you can help your lineman. You still have to work hard on your screen, draw, throw downfield packages. We will still try to be quick tempo. We will not huddle very much at all. We will try to move the ball like we always have.
On the status of the game plan for Rice: We did some Rice stuff last night. We’ll do Rice today in its entirety, then Monday will be all Rice. You have a break in the schedule, so we try to handle the first four or five games in preseason camp, and then we've got a week off to get the last part of the season. You work on it as much as you can, then you define where you need to be. We have enough in our offense and defense that we can give looks to our players that they don’t even know we’re giving, sometimes from other teams, because we just have it in our playbook and we can call it during practice and they don’t even know we’re working on it.
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