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TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY MEDIA CONFERENCE

October 31, 2011

Tommy Tuberville

COACH TUBERVILLE: Talk a little bit about last week's game. Obviously, we're all disappointed in what happened. You have to give, as I said Saturday night, give a lot of credit to Iowa State. We don't look for excuses. We look for reasons. A lot of times those help a little bit. Most of the time they don't, but as coaches, we try to avoid as much as we can.
This game's about emotion, and there are several games each year that emotions are going to have to be a lot more coming from the coaches and it's going to come from the players because you can only get up for so many games. We knew this was going to be a struggle with some of that.
When you go into the game, after the game we played last week, it was pretty much the highlight of what we've had here in the last 14, 16 months. We knew that we were going to have to play awfully well, and have the opportunity to generate the emotion that we generated the week before.
So, saying that, we're not a good enough team to go out and play football. We've got to play football with emotion. We've got to play football as coaches with emotion, and it just wasn't there.
Again, we're not good enough to go out there and say we can out-execute another team. We're not even close to that. We didn't do it, so we have to get back to the emotion part. Won't have any problem this week because of who we're playing. After looking at the film, we didn't play or coach that well on either side of the ball.
Special teams, we got off to a slow start. When we get off to a slow start on both sides of the ball, it's always not good. Normally one side or another, we'll get off to a decent start, but it's one of those games where we just didn't get going, and never got cranked up.
We didn't get our fans into it. We didn't use our home-field advantage, and we can chalk that up as one of those days. Hopefully you don't have too many of those in a player's career or coach's career. But I've seen it happen, and we can go back and change a lot of things, but that emotion part seldom changes.
This week's game should be fun. We're excited about going to Austin. They've got a much-improved team. They do a lot of different things than what we saw last year. They're very multiple on offense. They play two quarterbacks, they have a lot of speed. They've had an up and down year to this point as we have. Both looking for an identity.
Defensively, they've got a lot of good players back from last year, a lot of good speed. They've changed what they've done on the defensive side of the ball.
So, it's up in the air how each team will play each other in terms of game plan because it's pretty much two different coaching staffs playing with each other playing two different coordinators on their side.
It's always a game that people look forward to. It's a game in this state that will get even bigger each year. I think, with A&M going to the SEC, I think it will be a rival game that will match up each year hopefully two good teams. We've got to do our end of the bargain recruiting like they've recruited over the last ten or 12 years. We're trying to work on that and get to that level.
But it should be fun. I know our guys yesterday in this room you could tell how disappointed they were. But it's a lot easier to get over disappointment when you have a big rival game like this. Again, I think this should be a very good one. Questions?

Q. Coach, are you looking for somebody to step up and be an emotional leader who may not be a starter or maybe a walk-on or somebody to wave the towel on the sideline to get everybody fired up?
COACH TUBERVILLE: We did that last year. I'd take guys on the road, designate and know they wouldn't be players but they'd be cheerleaders on the sideline. But it would come from within, and I think it comes from winning and having a lot of confidence in what you're doing.
When you're still struggling to find the confidence am I doing things right enough? It's hard to be a leader. It's hard to be a cheerleader. People that don't play much, you can obviously get that out of players. But I'm looking for more guys that do it by example other than just voicing their opinion.
We've got some good leaders on the practice field, but right now when we get into games, we've got serious problems especially on the defensive side of the ball of everybody doing their thing, much less pulling the guy along with them. That comes from experience. That comes from success.
The game two weeks ago will go a long ways in learning how to play and knowing that they can play, knowing they've got a good enough team to play with anybody that they play. But still you have to have a lot more of that. You have to have success to earn that cheerleader status or that emotional status or that leader status as we would all call it.

Q. Are you glad to get back on the road?
COACH TUBERVILLE: You know, we've done pretty good on the road, but I still like playing at home. There is nothing like being at home and around your people. Again, a lot of people say well, the fans weren't into it, and we didn't give them anything to get into it. They won the toss which was huge. They took the wind. Said if we can hold them into the wind, we'll get the ball back with good field position, and they did just that.
We made one first down, punted the ball. They got the ball at the 45-yard line and short field, and they did some things with the quarterback that were a little bit different than what we've seen. We never got it under control before they had a 14 or 21-point lead. It worked out good for them.
They came in and played with a lot of emotion. Their back was against the wall. Ours weren't. We tried to tell them all week we need this game. We need to play well at home. We need to win a game at home. We just for some reason didn't have that edge like we did the week before.

Q. You had a team that really performed well in Norman, and you had the team --
COACH TUBERVILLE: Didn't perform.

Q. That barely showed up on Saturday night.
COACH TUBERVILLE: Right.

Q. Which is the Texas Tech team that fans should look to see more of?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, I'd say somewhere in the middle. We're not fast enough, we're not quick enough, we're not big enough on the defensive line to say we can go lineup and just shut anybody down on defense. Or we're not good enough on offense experiencewise to say we can go out and score 40, 50 points every time we lineup unless we have a lot of confidence.
Things went our way at Norman, and I thought typical of a young team against Iowa State, they jumped on us. We had fought back before, and sometimes our defense, we're behind, but our offense is going to bail us out.
I keep telling everybody, you can't win games and championships with offense every week. Your offense is going to have a bad game. They did, and that's exactly what you get. You've got to have a defensive football team.
Which they can show up every week, if guys get better and get confidence and you've got depth, but our defense has kind of lived off the offense all year long. It pretty much showed up Saturday. You've got to have a complete football team, and not half of a football team.

Q. At what point last week did you think there may be a problem?
COACH TUBERVILLE: I never thought there was a problem all week. We practiced well. It's just there are a lot of things that happen when they leave here and go home. Is their mind still on it? They came and watched film. They did a lot of work on their own.
What the problem was Iowa State came and kicked our butt. There wasn't a problem of -- the problem was Iowa State came in the first eight or nine minutes and set the tone, and we're not good enough to set it back. Offensively, if we would have played, I think, kept ourselves in the ballgame a little closer in the first half, we might have been able to dig ourselves out of it.
But when both offense and defense for us don't show up and make plays, and each other's waiting on each other's play, that's not going to happen. So we've got to become a complete football team and a coaching staff.
I mean, it's just not the players. We've got to know how to coach these guys in certain situations. It's easy to coach them when you go to Oklahoma and we get off to a good start.
But how do you motivate a kid that's never been in that situation before like we played the other night. On defense, hey, you don't start playing better, we're going to be so far behind, we're not ever going to catch up. It's kind of a new scenario.

Q. You talked about needing a lot of emotion, and this team has to play with emotion. Is it easier to get that emotion when you're on the road?
COACH TUBERVILLE: No, I think it's easier for who you play. I think there's going to be four or five games every year no matter where you're at that players are going to be excited about playing. This being one of them. And I think that you can pretty much look on everybody's schedule and say the coaches don't have to worry about this, and the guys are going to be ready to play. If you're not, you don't have a lot to you. You know what I'm saying?
There is emotion that plays so much in every sport. Not just this one. You've got to be on the edge of your seat. You've got to be anxious about playing. I'm not talking about preparation. Everybody's going to prepare. It's the one that has the mental edge when you get there that's going to have the edge in the beginning, and that was very evident the other night.

Q. Coach, Seth said that they had a player meeting yesterday. Is that the kind of thing that pleases you that shows you that there is some maturity going on with the team, and they resolved some things among themselves?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Yeah, and it was a lot of the younger players. We've got several seniors that play, not very many of them, that play a huge role in what we do, but it was good to see younger guys. Guys that will be back next year wanting to talk to the players and talk about a lot of things. About how to prepare sideline as we talked about earlier, dressing room, how to handle certain situations.
And that's exactly -- a player goes so much farther than a coach when it comes to something like that. Peer pressure is exactly what you need. It's evident that we've got some guys that want to do that, but they've got to become better leaders.
I know who they are. I wasn't even in here. I could just tell by the emotions that these guys were disappointed. Not embarrassed with how they played, but just disappointed because that can happen to anybody, I mean, anybody.
You look at any sport anywhere, and you're going to have some games that you've got to fight your way to win no matter what happens, and that was one of them, and we weren't able to do it because we're not to that point.

Q. You mentioned after the Oklahoma game how the exposure raising the stature of the program. In looking back, you said that was going to help recruiting, what sort of effect does it have on recruiting after you have what happens?
COACH TUBERVILLE: If you had told me I could have won one of those two games, it worked exactly the way we wanted it to. That's the one we wanted to win, for us where this program is for the future, because it got us on the map. A lot of people saw that.
I know it was a one-game flash, but it's still one that went everywhere. Everybody recognized. Everybody noticed. Of course a lot of people noticed last week, recruits, but still the one the week before really put us on the map with a lot of kids that maybe might not have even put us down as a possible look at in the future.
I would have loved to have won them both, but the situation that we're in and where we want to get to, we need a selling point, and that was a huge selling point.

Q. The changes they've made at Texas, how different is this team?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Oh, they're vastly different. They run formations, motions, four wides, three tight ends, they use all their backs. They use two quarterbacks. They're very multiple. But it's the Boise State stuff. They run a lot of trick plays, a lot of reverses. Their quarterbacks are pretty much mobile. They've got a lot of speed at running back.
But they're a young team too now. They're a team with a lot of players that will be there for a while as we are. So it will be two very young teams playing.
But defensively, totally different than what Will Muschamp did coveragewise, fronts, multiples, different, whole different personalities than what we saw the year before.

Q. How much time do you spend preparing for the Boise State wrinkles they're going to throw in there?
COACH TUBERVILLE: We looked over the summer. When we saw that Pease was hired, we went back and looked at coordinators. We have six films of what they've done, but he's also in the past done a few things you want to be prepared for. We've gone back and looked at trick plays and different formations. We kind of compare what he's done.
You can only do those things over a long haul, and so you want to be prepared for certain situations that they might be in this year so far. Our coaches did a good job over the summer of doing that. So we'll have a period every day, 10, 15 minutes of, okay, this is what they've done in the last two or three years in this situation that we need to be prepared for. Because if you go back and look at every game they've done this year, they've been very different each game in terms of formations, plays, how they scored points. What they do in the red zone.
Every team in our league's not going to have a real good dugout book on these guys until you've played them once and seen what they've done in the entire conference for a year. So this time next year we'll have a better look, better read on what they'll do consistently.
But I tell you right now, they do a lot, and they do it well. They make some mistakes because it's new, but it's a high octane offense that does a lot of different things, uses a lot of different weapons, and they've got a lot of weapons.

Q. With that being said, they ran the ball 72 times, 441 yards against Kansas in a spread formation. Are you going to have to commit more bodies to the box?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Our problem in the past is I like playing man coverage, but I don't think it's any secret to where we've struggled on the outside. When you struggle on the outside, it's hard to commit as much man as we'd like to. We've gotten better at it and gotten more people in the box.
But they force you to do it because of what they do moving around. They never lineup and snap the ball. They come out and lineup and might make two or three different changes and try to get you lined up in a certain way and then snap the ball.
Last week you could tell they had an open date. They go into that game, okay, we've got to get better at running the football and they did. They ran it very, very well.

Q. At the same time because they're so weak maybe at the quarterback spot, do you take advantage of that?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, you can say weak. I think what you could say is inexperienced. Any quarterback that's young and doing as much as what they're doing, it's going to take them a while to get everything done the way they want it.
You can tell they've told their offense we're going to run this offense. This is what we're going to do. We've just got to learn it as we go. Quarterbacks have a lot to grasp, and they've done a good job at it and gotten better each week.
Some of the teams they've played they've been able to run. They've been able to throw. They've matched up well with a lot of people, and they've gotten better. Probably have been a lot better for us to play them like we did last year earlier because there were some struggles that they had as everybody does with the new offense.
I like this offense. I like what they're doing. They know what they're doing. They know what they want to do, and they've got good players to do it. It's just the more and more opportunities they get, they'll improve it as we will.

Q. They held Kansas to 46 yards and three first downs. Is that more on their defense or Kansas' offense?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Well, Kansas has a very good offensive line. They had 40 yards on us in two plays, I think, so you can kind of compare that. What did they get, 20-0 on us if before we woke up?
So again, they had an open date week too. They might have done something different than what Kansas did.

Q. (Inaudible)?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Oh yeah. Again, there is a reason they've had all those number one recruiting classes. They've got good football players. You can tell they're enjoying running this offense and defense that they're running. They're getting better at it.
So it will be a huge challenge for us after coming off that game we had last week to go down. They have something to sell to their players. A team that beat them pretty good, we beat. So there is not going to be any reason for them to have a big game and say, okay, this is going to be a game we're going to be able to just win.
We'll have to go earn this win. This is going to have to be won on the road. One we'll have to go in and match-up with and prepare for and play as well as we possibly can to have a chance to win the game.

Q. How much did Iowa State take from Kansas defensive game plan running quarters and two man. Can Texas do the same thing to you?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Not really, because Iowa State and Kansas State do the same thing every day anyway. They changed a few things up that gave us a few problems. They took a few more -- Iowa State took a few more chances.
Texas is one that they're a lot more multiple in what they do. They can do that because they've got the type of players and they're getting better and better at it. You can tell they're loading up and they're preparing and they're not cutting back and trying to be basic because they want these players that they have right now that are going to be back to keep learning what they're doing.

Q. Quite the struggle against the run this year for you guys?
COACH TUBERVILLE: For us against the run? Well, if we go back and look at every team that's had a running quarterback, that's given us problems. We've played most of the time in Saturday the point of attack pretty well. We just didn't tackle very well.
We had 15 missed tackles in probably the first two and a half quarters, most of them were on the quarterback. We didn't play well on third down. There were three or four third down situations. If we would have just hung on in the first quarter and made at least one or two of those, I thought we'd be in pretty good shape, but we didn't convert.
They converted a couple pass plays. Quarterback ran the ball, and, again, it's all about staying in your gaps and not overpursuing.
We played a little too fast, if you can imagine us doing that on defense. We played a little too fast, and usually the quarterbacks that can move around and make plays take advantage of us being a little bit undersized and getting out of our gaps and playing too fast and running by the ball.

Q. Does that concern you with what's left on the schedule and how much longer it's going to take these guys to try to figure out that mobile quarterback with three of the next four games against mobile quarterbacks?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Yeah, pretty much everybody's got one that can run some. You can look at the ones and tell the ones that really want to run the ball. Most teams don't want their quarterback running the ball. They want to protect them and use their other players.
But we've got to get better at all of it. Most of these guys are back. We're kind of like I said about Texas a while ago. We're not going to do things that are not going to help us down the road. We've got to get better in a wide variety of things. We can't be so vanilla that it just hangs our offense out. We've got to try to make plays on defense, but we've just got to tackle better.
There's been a couple games that we cut back on, and I didn't think we played near as well as when we let our players play and we were a little bit more aggressive and challenged the other team.
There is a fine line between game plans sometimes with who you play and how you do it, but it all comes back to one thing. Tackling on defense, and we've got to get much better at doing that.

Q. What percentage is Darrin Moore healthy?
COACH TUBERVILLE: He's about 90%. He's just one of those deals that will go out and practice for a couple of days. And you've got to practice. He needs practice. Then after a couple of days of practice, he's sore and he doesn't have the leaping ability.
What makes him a good player as we saw in the first couple of games is him outjumping, corners. He doesn't have that right now. He doesn't have that vertical leap which makes him just another receiver.
That is the reason Torres has had such a good last four or five games. He's more the receiver type that's going to work to get open, catch the ball, and not worry about jumping.
We'd love to get him back. He's a very good weapon for us. His grandfather died this past weekend, and he might miss a day or two of practice, which is probably going to set him back a little bit.

Q. What about (Inaudible)?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Doesn't look good. We won't know more until this week. He'll be out this week and probably next. But he was probably our better player on defense in terms of getting people lined up and playing and making tackles. Just a shoulder injury he had in two-a-days, and it reoccurred. And Tre' Porter, we'll have to wait on him this week too. It doesn't look good for him for a while.

Q. You touched on this a little bit, Coach. But can you talk about this team's performance on the road versus at home?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Every team's different. We played a couple teams we probably should have won on the road. One that nobody gave us a chance. I think everybody would look at that and say we're a better road team.
You want to be able to play well on the road and convince yourself you can win on the road. It's very hard to do, but I'd rather be a better home team because that is a huge age. If you're at home playing well, get your fans into it, and we just haven't done that. We had two games that we probably had a great opportunity to win, and we didn't. That one Saturday night, we need to give ourselves a chance.
But emotions sometimes play a little bit different when you go on the road. I like this team's attitude on the road. You go, you get ready to play, and you go out and play and don't let anything bother you. So we'll see how we respond this week.

Q. You didn't mention this, but if you didn't, was it done on purpose? Offensive, defensive special teams players of the week?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Yeah, we don't pick them when we lose. We don't have any.

Q. What did you think of Jared Flannel after he came in?
COACH TUBERVILLE: He did well. He did well. He played about three-quarter speed. He's been banged up for the last few weeks, and he was the only person at that position, so we were just kind of hanging on and kind of figuring out who we're going to put at that position.
Now we'll probably move Dewhurst over and let him play at that position as a back-up. He's got to play back-up to another position. We've had enough injuries now with this stretch that it's getting a little bit serious. We want to move Shawn Corker over. Might move somebody else over this week to be able to finish up these last four games.
But Shawn played well when he played. It's just a good depth situation moved into a serious situation with losing those two guys in one game.

Q. What is your relationship with Mack?
COACH TUBERVILLE: I've known Mack a long time. When he was back at -- heck, when he was at Iowa State, we used to recruit against each other then he went to North Carolina. We went to Iraq together on that trip. I convinced him to go. He still holds that against me, how tough it was.
But, no, he's a good friend. He's been good for college football. He's been one of those consistent guys. Mack's won a lot of games too.

Q. What were you feeling when you saw the fans start to clear out of the stands Saturday night?
COACH TUBERVILLE: Yeah, I hate that. I hate it for the fans because we didn't give them a whole lot to watch. We had some diehards that stayed there, but it wasn't very pretty. I didn't really look up in the stands. I heard more about it than what I observed.
It's our responsibility to stay on top of that and make sure we put a good team out there that's going to play hard and play well. We played hard, we just didn't play well. We didn't give him anything to yell or scream about. Hopefully we'll do that next week when we come back against Oklahoma State.

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