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SUN BELT CONFERENCE FOOTBALL MEDIA DAYSJuly 22, 2019Jake SpavitalNew Orleans, Louisiana JAKE SPAVITAL: Just want to start off and just say how excited I am to be a part of this event. A lot of great energy and excitement right now in San Marcus, and pretty honored and privileged to be the next head coach here and especially be a part of this first-class event that's going on here at the Superdome. Got to thank every one of you guys for coming out here and promoting this conference. I think this is a very competitive conference. I think it's one of the better ones out there in terms of parity throughout the league and how competitive it is. I appreciate every one of you guys just giving us the opportunity to keep promoting this and selling the Sun Belt Conference. As you see guys, this is a first-class event. I've been to a lot of different conferences, Pac-12, SEC, Big 12, and this is right up there in the ranks of the first-class hospitality that the Sun Belt is giving. So I appreciate all you guys for promoting the Sun Belt. Honored today to bring two student-athletes that actually have a little more experience at Media Day than I do because they actually represented Texas State last year at this event. So you bring in Aaron Brewer and Bryan London, two guys that are just great student-athletes. Aaron Brewer is one of the most multiple offensive linemen. I've been a part of a lot of first-round draft picks. This is a kid that can play all different positions. Then you bring in Bryan London, who led the Sun Belt in tackles last year. They're not only just great athletes and good players but they also represent our university with integrity and character, and very honored and proud of these guys to have them here and represent Texas State University. Over the past seven, eight months it's been a blur for me. The whole analogy of drinking out of a fire hose is pretty accurate as a first-time head coach. But the first thing that we did is we hired a staff that has deep Texas ties. I have a coaching staff that I would put up against a lot of coaching staffs in the country, just based off of their ties and recruiting the state of Texas. But all of them come from the Power Five level. They've done it at a high -- at higher places and bigger conferences, and they just know what they're doing, which allows me to focus on other facets of the program, of anything that touches our program, because I trust these coaches not from a recruiting standpoint but also from a coaching standpoint, which is great for me because it allows me to look at different things in terms of nutrition and strength and conditioning and academics. And really the word that you hear a lot right now is alignment. It gives me the opportunity to work with our director of athletics, Larry Teis. Dr. Teis, who I worked with him hand in hand and President Trauth, you've got to thanks those two for allowing me the opportunity to be the next head coach here and keeping the alignment right, which is good, because you're only good as the people you surround yourself with. When you have a whole university and a community all pulling in the same direction and moving and having the same vision, there's a lot of good things that are going to happen when you have those forces. I'm going to open it up for questions right now. Q. How valuable is a veteran coaching staff when you're preparing for a team for a challenging opener like Texas A&M? JAKE SPAVITAL: Yeah, it's one of those things where a lot of my staff has been through the Big 12, and some of -- I coached at Texas A&M, our linebackers coach was a captain, Archie McDaniels, a captain for Texas A&M. I've got six coaches from Texas Tech and two from Oklahoma State. So we've got a lot of guys that have been in big games. They understand the magnitude of it. But it's refreshing to me because they can talk to the players and just tell them that, hey, you've got to take it one play at a time, worry about your job. There's going to be a lot of outside factors from an atmosphere, national TV, just that national TV stage to begin with is enough. So there's going to be a lot of people looking at you and eyes on you. But that's why you surround yourself with the staff that has done it at a higher level, and they try to get those kids in a good position and comfortable to go out there and play. Q. You've recently emphasized your emphasis to recruit players from San Antonio, Austin. What's the driving factor for wanting to keep local kids coming to San Marcus? JAKE SPAVITAL: Yeah, I've been fortunate to recruit central Texas for 10 to 12 years now, and there's a lot of talent. I've signed a lot of good players out of San Antonio and the Austin areas, some that went on to the NFL. When you look at the state of Texas, it just being so centrally located, and there's so many coaches from across the country all come in to -- especially the DFW area and the Houston area, which that areas gets overlooked at times. I also have a staff that looks deep into west Texas and east Texas, as well, because I think those are under-recruited, as well. We're going to do a good job of spreading ourselves across the entire state, but there's going to be an emphasis on trying to keep people in their backyard. Q. It's been a couple years now since Texas State has brought a quarterback to Media Day. You didn't bring one this year. Working with the quarterbacks you see now, do you see a future? What do you think now in your quarterback room? JAKE SPAVITAL: Yeah, there's going to be some coach speak with this now, but it is wide open right now. No one is ever going to come in here and declare their starting quarterback right now. We've a lot of moving parts in that room, and there's something I take a lot of pride in the quarterback position. I've got seven active NFL quarterbacks right now and I don't think there's anybody in the country that has that many guys, and what we've done with those quarterbacks is we've played to their strengths. We want the next guy to come in and be their own man, and understand that we're going to work with them and we're going to put them in positions that they are good at, and if you look at Tyler Vitt, Gresch Jensen and Jaylen Gipson, those are three different quarterbacks. We have to figure out what they do good. And we would call a game differently with all three of them in there. So we've got to make sure that we put them in situations throughout fall camp that are kind of high intensity, high stress, where they've got to think, and see who's the guys that are just going to move the ball, do smart things, be efficient, get the ball in the end zone, don't take unnecessary plays or turnovers, and we're not ready to declare that yet until we can put them in some higher-stress situations. You've got Gresch Jensen coming in, who's very familiar with Bob Stitt, who's calling the plays. So there's a familiarity with that, which is always a comfort for a play-caller, but I have not seen a separation in that room because Tyler Vitt has played. He seems to have that leadership mentality that those kids, he can galvanize that locker room, which there's a lot of intangibles to quarterback. I'm pretty intrigued with where that competition is going to go because all the other positions are kind of solidified in a way where that one I'm just not ready to just hand that one out yet, and I want to see some improvement on both ends with all the quarterbacks. Q. What do you feel like is going to be your main focus heading into this fall, and what do you feel like you're going to be able to do differently than maybe you couldn't do in the spring? JAKE SPAVITAL: Yeah, after going through spring and sitting down and looking at what we need to improve on as a team, if you look at how they played last year, they lost four games within a touchdown and they lost six games within 10 points. To me that goes down to playing together and playing smart, efficient football. That really goes down to maybe two to five plays that changed the outcome of the game. And what we've got to do is eliminate that, especially from an offensive perspective where we are going to start emphasizing that on the first day of fall camp on how we've got to play together as a team. We have to pay attention to detail, worry about the little things, and don't put ourselves in bad situations. If we can do that, we can be competitive in every single game. But it's the whole aspect of playing together and then being able to finish games at the end. That's kind of going off of what we're going to do in fall camp is, we've got to put these guys in situations where they've got to think all the time: Where I typically haven't put them in situational football until about four, five, six, seven practices down the line, we're going to start situations from day one just so we can start becoming a smarter football team. Q. Where do you see Texas State recruiting right now, especially as you prepare for the season? Are you about where you'd like to be? Obviously you're always planning for that next squad. How is recruiting looking and is it at all taking a backseat to preparing for this first season? JAKE SPAVITAL: No, recruiting is always the first thing that we've got to focus on. So we're constantly recruiting. Right now I like where we're at. We have four commitments right now, which is fine with me. Normally I've been a part of universities that have 18 commitments right now, that sometimes you start looking through their senior tape and you're like, we may have second thoughts on a kid, where I like how we're not rushing into it, we're trying to find guys that fit our program and our culture that we're trying to create, so I really like where I'm at, especially with the two signing days. I found out that you can get a lot of quality players in that second signing period, and that's why we're not in a complete rush to just sign guys. There's also words that you guys use, a hot topic that has been around is the transfer portal. That's something that our league can use pretty efficiently. If you look at a lot of the top players in this league, they came from other universities, and that just shows you where that transfer portal can work. As a staff, we have to sit there and get a database as large as we possibly can, and we have to start just whittling it down. You're not going to get every single one of them obviously, but once you get down your list, you've got to see if that kid is comparable to the rest of the conference, because the goal is to win the conference. If that kid is not comparable to the rest of the conference, and you don't think you can win with that kid, that's when the transfer market and the transfer portal comes into play. So we're being very patient with how we're approaching it, and daily we're recruiting and just trying to gather up as much information and data on these kids in the state of Texas. Q. Blake Anderson I think is the longest tenured coach in this league right now. How well do you know him and what can you learn from a guy like him who's had success in this league? JAKE SPAVITAL: Yeah, I've been following coach Anderson for a long time. Just from the Larry Fedora tree and just being around those guys. It's interesting how college football, we all know each other in some particular way. And just being able to meet a lot of those guys that know him or been around him through the Oklahoma State tree and all that, nothing but great things have always been said with him, a stand-up, high-character guy, which is probably the best ambassador for this conference right now just based off of where he's been, all the adversity that him and his family have gone through and how he handled that with such integrity, it shows you the character of that guy. Man, and it doesn't surprise me that his teams play that way because the teams are normally a reflection of the head coach, and you can see the resiliency of his teams. Q. (Question regarding Bob Stitt.) JAKE SPAVITAL: Bob Stitt was always that guy that was around, and over the years I used a lot of his stuff at the different schools that I've been at, and he's a very innovative mind. He's done more with less. He's been calling plays for 30 years. He was a head coach at Montana, so the guy has worked from nothing, from really division II as the offensive coordinator at Austin College, and he worked himself all the way to developing a program at Colorado School of Mines to being the head coach of Montana. His résumé and track record alone is great. Yeah, I'm giving up the play-calling duties, which has been difficult for me, but that's just the nature of being competitive. But I couldn't be more happy with giving it to a guy that's just as distinguished as he is. The quick motion toss play, for instance, is a play that he created. There's things like that that you watch every single game and you see a staple of what Bob Stitt did. I feel so good with him just handling the offensive side and that allows me to go focus on some other things needed to advance this program. Q. Just following the league from, I guess, afar the last couple years, what do you know about the Sun Belt as a football conference, and what are you kind of expecting to see this year? JAKE SPAVITAL: Yeah, it's like what I've said. I think that it doesn't get the credit that it deserves. I've played against -- like I've played against ULM, Texas A&M, and that was 2014, and we were in a dogfight the entire game. There's enough talent in here, it's a very competitive league. When you have three 10-win teams, I don't know if there's another conference out there that has three 10-win programs in the conference. Maybe one, maybe two, but I doubt that. It just shows you the parity. You look at all the games, they're all very competitive, and it's like I said, we lost six games within 10 points. It's not like teams are just completely blowing everybody out, and there's just a dominant force. There's a lot of quality teams in here, and again, I think there's a lot of great coaches. You look at the backgrounds of these head coaches, they all came from SEC, they all are very qualified guys that really could be doing anything they wanted to with their careers. It just shows you how this conference from about five, six years ago to where it is now, it is completely different than the exposure, the attention, the coaches, the players, just everything is just trending upwards with this conference. Q. Just dabbling a little bit in hypotheticals, if your first season as head coach doesn't pan out so well and you maybe have a losing season, what's your method for bouncing back in your second season and just instilling that everything is going to be all right and keep playing the next play? JAKE SPAVITAL: Yeah, it's all about one day at a time. It's a tough game, but it is a team game, and that's what you've got to keep developing the culture. It's got to come down to the team and playing together. I've been a part of teams that didn't perform as high as they needed to and I've been a part of teams that performed way higher than they should have. And that's why coaches, you hear a lot of coach speak of just staying the course and process driven, and it's about just continuing to grind and work and make sure that you're doing everything the right way and putting those kids in the right position. You never look at wins and losses, you just worry about how we can keep getting this team better currently. You know, the competitive side of it, you want to win every single day, but when it doesn't happen, you've got to get back to the drawing board and you've got to fix what the deficiencies are and keep moving forward. That's the beautiful thing about football is that you can start a year off and be a completely different identity by the end of it based off of injuries or anything that may occur so you've got to be ready to keep putting those guys in the right position to have success. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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