|
|||
|
|||
|
 |
|
|
CITI BCS NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP GAME: TEXAS v ALABAMAJanuary 6, 2010Mack BrownPASADENA, CALIFORNIA THE MODERATOR: Please welcome head coach for the University of Texas, Mack Brown. We'll have Mack make an opening statement. Coach, welcome. COACH BROWN: Thank you. We first want to thank the Tournament of Roses committee for a great week. It's been a long week. It's been a long month. And then just talking to Coach Saban, I know the coaches and the players are ready to go and see who is the best team in the country. It's been -- when you have a month and two days to prepare, what you do is you go back and try to correct all the mistakes that you made at the end of the season, and at the same time prepare for the best team in the country, the No. 1 team in the country that's well-coached and very talented. It's challenging, but at the same time, it's exciting to see how you match up against the best. We also have so many of our current NFL guys coming back for the game, it'll be fun. I think there's about 17 to 20 that have said that they'll be here. A number of them have already come out to practice and have been around the team and were able to speak to the team. So it's fun to have them back. But excited about the game. When you start with 120 teams and it's down to two, that's about 12,000 players, and it's a great honor for your players and your coaches to be in this game. Q. Give us your thoughts about what makes Nick Saban so successful. COACH BROWN: I really admire what Nick has done. If you look at what he has done, he's coached at every level. He's been an assistant coach, a coordinator, a head coach at three different schools now and done very well in all of those. He's a successful professional assistant and head coach. So he gets it. He's driven. He works very hard. His teams are very disciplined. They're well-coached, and he wins at everything he touches. I just think when you see what he does, you just admire the way he handles his business, the way he runs his program. He's in charge. He's confident, and his teams play like that. Q. Is 32 days too long between games, and what can be done to change that, even if there's no playoff? COACH BROWN: For the coaches it's probably not. I mean, we can use it all. For the players, they lose part of their Christmas, they lose part of their new year, and as we all talk about trying to take care of the players, our guys go back to school here in about a week, and then we have spring practice at the end of February. I wish there was a way that we could move this game at least back maybe a week. And I think that when you see for the kids, because of what's at stake, they're excited to be here, so I don't want to insinuate in any way our guys are griping about how much time they've spent. But it's a lifetime experience for them, but I do think that if it could be cut down, it would be better. Our game in the Fiesta Bowl last year was the 4th, and we thought that was even manageable. But when you get to the 7th, I think last year was the 8th, it starts getting into the semester. I think Alabama had to call school off for two or three days because they were getting ready to start school before the game. And then a lot of our friends that are teachers and coaches had to start school again and couldn't come out to the game. Q. Talk about the emotion of your team. Have you had to clamp down on them, or do you want to clamp down on them this final couple of days? COACH BROWN: When you've got 122 guys and 64 of them will play, they all have different personalities. It's like you'd nearly like to get them in different rooms and try to get each one of them ready to play separately, because if you take Sergio Kindle and Colt McCoy, it's hard to give them the same speech. You have to look at different speeches, different things. What we try to do is throw enough stuff on the wall that some of it sticks for each one of them. You try to excite this one this way and this one this way. We challenge our assistant coaches and coordinators to work with their groups. We challenge each player to get himself motivated in the way he needs to to win this ballgame. And then my job is to try to make sure there's some balance. It's one of the unique things about Bowl games. How much do you hit, because you have to hit, because you take the month off. You don't want to hit too much to get them tired. You don't want to hit too much to get them hurt. How much do you do your best against your best? When you're playing a team like Alabama that's so talented, you need to play against fast guys and tough guys, so we've done that for a full month. How much do you condition? And then how tired do they get when they practice and they handle the Bowl routine and they're out at the functions? So it's really a unique experience to try to get a team ready for a one-game season that means this much for three and a half hours. What we will do is have a blend of some fun tomorrow with them before the game, and again, give them the last-minute adjustments that we feel like they need to focus on to win the game. Q. I talked to some of your players yesterday, and they were talking about Texas football, and I asked them what is Texas football, and they said it was fast, furious, fun, physical, playing with a swagger. I was just interested in your definition of Texas football. COACH BROWN: Well, they usually say what we say. (Laughter.) They usually repeat it. Very honestly, you want to be fast. You want to have fun. You want to be physical. I wasn't the smartest guy in the world, so one day I said it's full of F's, it's fast, have fun, be physical, and they all laughed. Some of them didn't get it. That bothered me more. (Laughter.) Q. A lot of your players, especially the younger ones, talked yesterday about how they can't imagine what they're going to feel like when they step on the field for the first time during the game. As a coach, even though you've been here three times now, do you take a moment to relish when you first get out there at the beginning? COACH BROWN: When we came here in '04 for the '05 Michigan game, I thought it was the coolest thing, and I didn't know what to do, because a young guy from Cookville, Tennessee, would never be able to coach or play in the Rose Bowl. Same thing for Alabama. I grew up an Alabama fan. I watched Coach Brown. But you didn't come west. You played in the Cotton Bowl and you played in the Orange Bowl and you played in the Sugar Bowl, but this was taboo for us. I actually called John Robinson, who -- I admired Coach McKay so much who won a bunch of Rose Bowls at SC, so I called Coach Robinson and said, help me with what to do; what's the Rose Bowl like? Tell me about the parade. Tell me about what the kids are supposed to do. What he said was very unique. He said, it's very, very hard to get to the Rose Bowl as a player or coach; very few people get to do it. What you need to do is be really proud, and when you stand out on the field before the game, make sure you go out there by yourself, stand in a corner, look up in those beautiful mountains, see the sun setting and say this is pretty cool, and then go back and do what you always do. But take a moment to appreciate it. I'm not sure when you're wanting to win as badly as the Alabama kids are and the coaches and the Texas kids and coaches are right now, I'm not sure you can appreciate it, because to have three and a half hours to win a National Championship is so unique that -- it's so important that you'll probably reflect on it later. When we looked at the Michigan win, we thought it couldn't get any better than that. The next year we beat SC, and we said, ooh, this is better than that. So now you're back to the now. This game is very important to both teams. They're historic programs, very proud fan bases in both cases. The history of the game is so important to both. Coach Royal is still alive and has things named after him. I think Coach Brown still walks the halls at Tuscaloosa, and he has things named after him. But everybody that sees the "A" and sees the Longhorns knows the programs, and that's what makes this game so special. Q. You're known for bringing in speakers to visit with your team, motivate them before games. Did you bring in anyone in particular for this game, and tell us how you've seen those visits affecting your team and yourself. COACH BROWN: What you'd like to do is use the platform as a head coach to help educate your guys and try to help them learn some life lessons because you have their attention before a game like this, or when they've got a great team, they'll listen. The chemistry is good. At the FCA breakfast yesterday, the young man Jake that had lost his eyesight that had been around the SC team was there and spoke, and I think we all teared up, to see how tough a young guy is at his age, so we can constantly learn. When we were watching the Super Bowl two years ago, there was a gentleman that caught my attention, Lieutenant Colonel Greg Gadson, and he had his legs blown off in Iraq, and I was able to go to the Middle East and spend eight days this summer and got a new appreciation of, number one, the young people that are out there trying to save our lives every day so we can play a game like this, and number two, every time they get up and walk out of their barracks they have a chance to die, so their lives are on the line every minute. I didn't know anything about Lieutenant Colonel Gadson, but I saw him on the sideline for the New York Giants game. Will Muschamp's brother went to West Point with him. I was trying to get a hold of him and talk to him because I wanted to know about his story. Will's brother got a hold of him. He was supposed to come to our Texas Tech game and be an honorary captain. We like for our guys to meet special people. His mother died that week so he couldn't come. But he sent a message, just tell the guys I'll come to the Baylor game, but the message was that you don't control your circumstances, but after you get them you have to deal with them and make them positives. And that is so true for all of us every day. It's going to be true tomorrow night during the ball dame. He came to the Baylor game and it was really touching for all of us. Here's guy with two protheses that he gets up and walks around on, and he doesn't wear long pants because he gets knocked down if people don't know he doesn't have legs, and he also said, this is who I am, so I want people to see who I am. He came back for the Big-12 Championship game and he'll be out here with us tomorrow night, and not as much for the ballgame but for the life lessons. And I think for him to say I was in a group of 250, a roadside bomb hit my truck, I was the only one injured in the 250, I came home, I lost my legs, and I went from being an athlete at West Point, Lieutenant Colonel leading a group, now I can't walk, so my life has changed. What a great message for our guys who say my hamstring is a little sore and my ankle is tweaked and I have a headache, so I do think there's some things there that can always show that people are worse off than we are. Q. Do you ever think -- I know you've been asked, and you probably think about coaching at the so-called next level. It seems like there's a coach who has the best players against the best coaches against coaches who make more money than you. Is any of that compelling at all, or is this sort of your next level? COACH BROWN: No. At one time it was compelling. I think it would be -- depending on if I knew the owner and I trusted the owner, I want to recruit the players that I want to coach. So if I coached somewhere else, I'd have to be in complete control, and I think that's what you get in college football. You get to make the decisions within the structure of your athletic director and your president, but I also was told one time that don't ever coach a player that you can't buy a house in his neighborhood, and that makes sense, because if he makes that much more than you do -- I've heard the Joe Namath stories where Dan Henning was coaching him and Dan jumped on Joe, and the head coach said, okay, now, we've sold all these tickets, are they coming to see you or him. So I do understand it's different. Q. As in every sport, to be successful you've got to be prepared physically, technically, tactically, mentally and nutritionally, but I want to ask if it's easy to detect when somebody needs something on the technical or tactical side. How do you prepare a team to be on the edge of the mental preparation? How do you approach it? COACH BROWN: It's complicated, like we said. When you've got that many kids and you have to try to get all of them mentally prepared, you have to -- I think the hardest thing about our game is, number one, you have to figure out who you are. You have to reinvent yourself each year because we're not pro football. You have to figure out who to feature. If your best pass rusher is Sergio Kindle, Will has done a great job of putting him in different situations so he can be a pass rusher that is hard for them to find. They can't just say these two guys are going to block him because they'll move him around. Nick does the same thing. They both do a tremendous job of disguising and putting them in different situations. And then you have to figure out what the task difficulty, what can you handle? We didn't do that very well with our offense against Nebraska. So we're sitting here now, we're playing against a great front, a well-designed defense, a secondary that can cover you man-to-man, so there's a tremendous amount of pressure on our offensive staff to try to figure out what can we do to give our kids the best chance to win the game. And the kids know that. They're not stupid; they watch and they know. That's why the coordinators and the head coach are so important when it comes to game planning, because a lot of the confidence that you will have going into the ballgame is the feeling that you are prepared and that your coaches give you an edge. I can remember asking David Thomas -- and I know Nick does this with his team, his team feels this way and I hope our team feels this way. I asked David Thomas, the tight end for the New England Patriots, why does Bill Belichick win, and he said all of our players on the team feel like he gives us an edge in the ballgame with game plan. And unless coaches do that, then we're not worth what we're supposed to be worth for the kids. They need to feel like they have an advantage with you as the coach going into the game, and to do that -- they're hard. You have to continually give them opportunities to find ways to be successful on the field, and that's what they expect out of you. Q. A few years ago you had a quarterback who didn't win the Heisman playing against a team with a running back who did. COACH BROWN: Who was that? (Laughter.) Q. Curious because of the similarity with the situation this year, almost exactly the same on the same field, the Rose Bowl, are you using that at all for any motivation for your team? COACH BROWN: Again, I think players use whatever they need to individually. If you ask Colt if he'd have rather won the Heisman or lost it, if you asked Vince, both of them would say I'd rather have won. Colt was more disappointed last year than he was this year because I think he felt like he had better numbers and had a better year. But I think when you go back and look at it, what motivation would you need to play a team like Alabama, a team like SC more than just to play for a National Championship? And to me, sitting here as the Texas coach in such a proud program, I'm so proud of the last six years because we've played -- this will be our fourth BCS game. We've played Michigan, we've played USC, we've played Ohio State, and now to play Alabama, and two of those four we had never played before, this has been a good run, and it's fun. For Colt to stand on the sideline and watch Vince win a National Championship and then four years later have his chance, I really don't think with Colt as positive as he is, I don't think that he would use a negative to motivate. I think he would want to be the National Championship quarterback a lot more than he would relish being angry because he didn't win something. Last year I thought he was upset. I thought Vince was upset, because I thought Vince thought he would win it. I don't like sitting there with the kids -- I sat with Ricky Williams when he won the Heisman. I didn't like what happened to the other three or four kids. They have press conferences and they're just crushed. And the same thing with Colt last year; he handled it better this year. The same thing with Vince. It's a very, very disappointing thing. It's a shame that you're one of the best three or four players in America and feel like you're a loser, and that's a difficult thing for those kids. I hope I get to go back one time, but I think I'd go now more and support if he loses than being there if he wins. Q. I wonder if you could talk about your special teams, how important potentially kickoff returns could be, particularly with the return of DJ back into the lineup and Marquise has played well while he's been gone. COACH BROWN: I talked to a friend of mine that's a professional golfer the other day, and he said you're going to have to hit most of the fairways and make some long putts to win this game. And I think that's true. And turnovers become huge in this game, and Alabama has done a great job of protecting the football. Both teams have done a good job of forcing turnovers. Explosive plays are going to be very important. They've got more in the running game, but they can do them in the passing game. Most of ours have come in the passing game. When there's as much man coverage and blitzing as there will be and disguising going on, there's going to have to be some big plays to win the game because I don't think either team will just run up and down the field. It hasn't happened to either defense all year. And then the kicking game with field position and a chance for explosive play. So you try to get your guys in space with the ball and hope they can make something happen. You never know in a game like this what's going to turn the game around. We've gone back and looked at our Oklahoma game, we've looked at our Nebraska game because those are similar athletes, those two teams, as what we will be playing tomorrow night. It was funny, we had seven explosive plays to one against Nebraska but both teams had three turnovers, and we lost the kicking game four to one. Against Oklahoma we won the kicking game five to zero. The explosives were about the same, and we had four turnovers and they lost five. Neither one of those games did we protect the ball very well, and that will be crucial for us to be successful tomorrow night. Q. We've made a lot this week about the differences, at least externally, between you and Nick. It's easy, I guess, for people to see how Alabama would show up as a tough, nasty football team. But for a guy who seems and has said he enjoys the journey, how do you get your kids to show up that way on weekends? COACH BROWN: It's really funny. I've been asked all week if I'm really nice. (Laughter.) I mean, I was taught in a small town in Cookville, Tennessee, to say yes, sir, and no, sir, and yes, ma'am, and no, ma'am. I was taught to open doors. I was taught to allow ladies to walk through and gentlemen older than I to walk through the door before I did. And if I didn't do that, I got whipped. I mean, that's what happened at my house. So I still feel dad standing there when you walk up and shake my hand; I'm going to shake yours. And I'm going to be nice or I'm not going to have anything to say. Nick is really nice to me. He is very respectful to me. I enjoy being around him. I know maybe not to you all, but we have two coaches on our staff who have worked for him, and I have great respect for what they say about him, and I would think that -- in truth there's probably a lot more similarities between the two of us than there are differences. The way we run or programs, our practices, the toughness, it's always interesting to me. I think we have 47 active players in the NFL. We have three guys that have gained 1,000 yards as running backs this year in the NFL this year. And people say our NFL guys are soft. Well, some fools keep drafting them, so I can't figure out why, but they do, and they're all playing, and they're playing very well. This football team has won 26 of 27, and they're soft. Lord, I hope they can get tougher again tomorrow night. I do think it's perception. I smile. I shake hands. I laugh. I like for the kids to have fun. These kids are tough. They compete. Alabama's kids are tough. They're going to compete. You're not going to get a bad team in this game. You may get one in the BCS, you're not going to get one in this game. There's two good teams in this game. Q. You and Alabama obviously have two of the best defenses in the country. Do you feel like defenses have caught up with the spread offense and maybe more emphasis to defense and running like back when you played? COACH BROWN: I do feel like that defenses got mad last spring and spent a lot of time working on the spread. There's a lot more blitzing, there's a lot more man coverage, there's a lot more press. They're not giving the easy throws like they did a year ago. And it's something that we've even tried to adjust and work through during the year. We will have to do a great job of protecting and beating man coverage tomorrow night to be able to win the game. And it's something we've got to reevaluate this spring. But I do think that defenses did a much better job this year than they did last year. Now, if their players are as good as yours and they line up and cover yours all over the field, it's hard to get guys open. That's just what you're doing. In a game like tomorrow night there's going to be some really good defensive players. There will be a lot of NFL guys over time from both defenses. I don't see people just making easy drives and having easy plays tomorrow night. Q. A lot has been made of the low scores against Oklahoma and Nebraska. Do you think there's a misconception that when there's a low score in a Big 12 game that there's something wrong with those teams, whereas in the SEC they play those kind of games every week, and no one seems to criticize those teams? COACH BROWN: Yes, I grew up in the SEC. I mean, I grew up 72 miles from Nashville and 114 miles from Knoxville and loving Coach Bryant and Alabama and the tradition. There's so much passion in the south. You can't get tickets to games. People do live and die. We're talking about a league that's been there forever as compared to a league that's been around 12, 13 years, that took a Southwest Conference and a Big Eight and put them together. In my estimation in watching and listening, being an SEC guy from my past, the perception is that the football teams in the SEC are much better than the football teams in the Big 12. Fair or not fair, perception is not always reality, but that doesn't mean that the SEC is not really good. It also doesn't mean that the perceptions are right about the Big 12. What we've had is we have not had as many good teams in the Big 12. We've had some great teams. And I think you look at the defense at Oklahoma and you look at the defense at Nebraska, nobody ran up and down the field against either one of them. They've got really good players and a really good defense. Our defense is the same, so when you get a game like that, as we said, we've averaged 40-something points since we've been at Texas, and when we score 16, everybody thinks it's a bad game. They get all over our offensive staff. I think you've got to give credit to the other side. Q. When you're not sleeping tonight, what will be racing through your mind? COACH BROWN: When you get anxious before the ballgame because, number one, we're two hours different, so I'm waking up at 4:00 now thinking it's at 6:00, you'd think I'd get over that after a week. But what you're doing is you're making sure that you're going through a checklist in your mind. Are they going to onside kick to open the game? Do we? How do you punt it? How do you protect? What about your fakes? What about protection? How do you start the game? How do you get your offense more comfortable than they were against Nebraska? What do you do on defense? Has Alabama opened it up with a wide-open offense against Florida to start the game differently than they had in some other games? Will they start with drop back and play action against us? Will they try to run Ingram to start the game? What am I supposed to say? I'll have 122 sets of eyes looking at me, an entire staff looking at me tomorrow afternoon at about 2:00 wanting me to put some sense into how important this game is. I want you focused, I want you tough, I want to ready to play, but I want you to have fun, which gets really contradictory when they're looking at you. Is it important, Coach? Yeah, it's the National Championship. You're the best at what you do in the country, and you've got three and a half hours to prove it. You want to respect Alabama, but you don't want to have your team where they're not sure that they think you think they can win, because they have to know myself and our coaches think we can win. So all of those things go through your mind. What can you say in a five-minute period to relax them and make sure they're focused when they've had a month and two days to prepare for this? So it's a real unique time because we will go to -- they call it a ghost hotel, so we'll get out of our hotel, we'll go somewhere it's really quiet, and we'll have time. This afternoon is kind of fun. We'll have pictures at the Rose Bowl. Only seven of our kids have ever seen the Rose Bowl, so they'll be able to walk around and talk about the history of the Rose Bowl and think about the game. Then we'll go to our hotel, we'll have a chapel for those that are interested this afternoon. They'll stay in their rooms and watch a movie tonight. I'm going to watch Troy and Central Michigan; I'm pumped. (Laughter.) I've already got it on my slate for dinner. We'll have us a little team dinner and then meetings tonight. We'll have our regular routine. One of the things I don't think you can do -- I'll close with this because I've been long. Sanya Richards is a great track star from Texas, and she's engaged to Aaron Ross of the New York Giants. In fact, it's the only pro football player that his girlfriend can outrun him. I've always said that. It's really embarrassing for him, but it's true. He's not going to get any faster; he cannot beat her. In the short or long, he can't beat her, it doesn't matter. But she loses the gold medal and she's way ahead, and she pulls up, and it crushed her. I sat there and watched her. Her whole life she wanted to win that gold medal. Three days later she was in the relays and she just burned everybody on the last leg and won the gold medal. So we had her come and talk to our team. We didn't tell her what to say, we didn't know what she would say, and we sat and listened and she gave one of the best messages I've ever heard. She said, what happened to me in the Olympics is that I wanted to win the gold medal so badly that I couldn't sleep, and I was very uncomfortable, and I thought so much about winning that I didn't prepare. I didn't take the proper fluids, I didn't eat properly, and when I thought I had it won, because of the lack of preparation, I pulled up. She said, three days later, I went back and said, forget it, I've got to be who I am, I've got to do what I do, and I've got to do what I do best. So I had to go back and prepare to win the gold, not just sit and look at winning the gold. So what we've done with our team has said, it's about the pieces, it's not about the whole, it's about the now. You've got to prepare every day like it's the opening game of the year, like it's the Oklahoma game, like it's the Nebraska game or the Big-12 Championship because you can't be something you're not. You are who you are, and what we have to do -- we haven't played our best game yet. They don't have to play perfect. It's college football, it's kids, they're not going to play perfect. We're not going to do a perfect job of coaching. But what we all have to do is I have to do my best, and each player -- we have a little saying, "all in," each player is here for a reason, and each of them has to do their best. If our best isn't good enough, we'll be disappointed and go home and start working on spring practice. But we can't do more than who we are, and when you start trying to be something you're not or do more than what you can do, that's when you get in trouble and get beat in my estimation. Alabama has lost two games in two years. Texas has lost one game in two years. What you all are going to see is two very confident coaching staffs and two very confident teams play as hard as they can for three and a half hours to win a National Championship. And it is very unusual to have two undefeated teams in the National Championship. The BCS got lucky. Same thing in 2005. We sat here in 2005, and SC was an unbelievable team, and I can remember Texas was soft. I can remember NFL guys are soft. I can remember we don't have a chance, and our guys played great that night. I also remember standing out on the field before the game and looking down at SC and seeing the horse and the band and all the good stuff about SC that all of us grew up with, and I saw Pete and talked to him for a while, and I was standing there, and Greg Davis, the offensive coordinator came up, and I thought, my gosh, they've got a great-looking football team. Look at those guys. He just patted me on the shoulder, and he said, "Well, turn around. Yours look pretty good, too." I thought that was pretty good. I'm not sure that we ever give ourselves enough credit. We've got a good team, too. Anything else? THE MODERATOR: Thank you, Coach. End of FastScripts |
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
About ASAP Sports •
FastScripts Archive •
Recent Interviews •
Captioning •
Upcoming Events •
Contact Us
FastScripts | Events Covered | Our Clients | Other Services | ASAP in the News | Site Map | Job Opportunities | Links |
|
ASAP Sports, Inc. | T: 1.212 385 0297
|