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ROSE BOWL GAME PRESENTED BY VIZIO: TCU v WISCONSINDecember 29, 2010Dave DoerenBlake SorensenCulmer St. JeanPASADENA, CALIFORNIA COACH DOEREN: Just start off saying how excited we are to be here. Finally got a chance yesterday to get the guys up on the grass after all the rain and slide around a little bit. But I know they've been practicing here for seems like a month getting ready for this game and just really excited and pleased and proud of everything that these guys have done and look forward to playing on Saturday. Q. Dave, any Bowl question is how do you keep guys sharp after a month between games? What's your method? COACH DOEREN: Well, they've got a pretty good process. Coach Alvarez kind of set the schedule, and his Bowl record speaks for itself. I don't know if Bret has kind of adhered to it. But we give the guys a little bit of a break after the last game, try to get everybody healthy and our strength staff gets them built back up body-wise and get the younger guys a lot of time and let them kind of coach them up, kind of refreshes them mentally and physically. And then once we get back going, it's almost like two-a-days as far as the tempo. We have long practices and we tackle and make it as game-like as possible. Now it's more just polishing things. I know they're sick of hitting each other. It's a long prep, there's no doubt. But there's -- the schedule that's been set has been very successful. Q. Dave, do you think you enjoyed this whole Bowl process any more this year because of your situation knowing that you're going to be leaving? You maybe will appreciate the players or anything else a little differently? COACH DOEREN: I mean, it's definitely a closing moment as far as what I've done here, and it's been emotional. These two guys here sitting with me, I've been with them their whole careers. In coaching you don't always get to follow a guy from recruiting to graduation, and so that's a really special deal for me as a coach. Obviously playing in the Rose Bowl, whether I was staying or going, would be special. There's not many guys that can say they coached a team in this football game. And to make it my last game, you know, at Wisconsin, it's been a very special week. Q. For the players, along those same lines, how big a deal is it for you to still have Coach Doeren here through the Bowl game? BLAKE SORENSEN: Yeah, I think it's been great. Coach Doeren wouldn't have it any other way. He started the season with us and obviously he's going to finish it with us. So it means a lot. A lot of coaches you see around college football going and take other jobs and leave teams, so it means a lot for the players, and we want to finish this thing right. CULMER ST. JEAN: Yeah, it's definitely a big deal. I'm happy that he's here. Coach Doeren is all I know, and he coached me up and he sculpted me into the player that I am today. I appreciate him for staying. We all know what to expect from him. He hasn't changed one bit even though he has an opportunity to be a head coach. We all know it's a special moment. We hope to send him out on the right note. Q. This is for Blake and Culmer. How do you feed off of J.J. Watt's energy? He shared with me a story after the Northwestern game about how Jay Valai came up to him and said block an extra point and he did it, and Jay was like shaking his head how this guy does all this stuff. BLAKE SORENSEN: Yeah, he's great to play with. He's a high-energy guy. He never stops playing, and really he makes everyone better. When you're out there and you see J.J. making a play, it makes you want to do the same thing. It's an honor to play with him, and he's carried us all year, and hopefully we can keep that going. CULMER ST. JEAN: Yeah, J.J. is a phenomenal player. He's a tempo setter, allows us to play at a high level, and he makes plays when it's necessary, allows us to get off the field, and having somebody like that makes it a lot easier to be a linebacker. Q. Coach Doeren, along the same lines, what does J.J. bring to this defense and what dimensions that you can play with him with? COACH DOEREN: Well, I mean, obviously he creates a situation for an offense where they've got to account for him all the time. I think that creates opportunity for other guys. When everything is centered around how to block a certain player, it opens up doors for other guys to produce. To his credit, he hasn't allowed the double teams or the protections to affect his production. So it's been fun to be around him. Obviously for me it's great because I can move him around and do some things with him. The thing about J.J. that's special, there's a lot of good players in college football, but his ability to learn and do multiple things puts him in a position to be special for us because we can play him in a lot of different spots. Q. Dave, is Patrick Butrym one of those guys that just keep quietly rising up the charts and just does his job, or how do you view his role? COACH DOEREN: Yeah, Pat is definitely an accountable and dependable guy. Three of the words we talk about all the time on defense is smart, tough, dependable. If we're those three things then we've got a chance. Pat is one of those guys. He works, he's a technician. Very rarely is he out of position, and that's what makes him great, and he plays hard. He's not a flashy guy, he's not overly productive, but at the same time he's always in the right place, he's doing things the way he's coached to do and he does them consistently. As a coach you know where he's going to show up, and you know what his weaknesses are and you can try to help him. Q. If you could just talk about some of the challenges of going up against a veteran quarterback like Andy Dalton, one with BCS experience. COACH DOEREN: I think Andy is a very good football player. Obviously when you start as many games as he has and won as many games, he's the manager of their team, he does a very good job of getting them in the right place, getting the ball to the right people. He's got a quick release. He doesn't take sacks. He's a good football player, and he's well coached. Their offense has a lot of different things that they do. Schematically he understands it, and he's a lot like Scott Tolzien. He's a little more athletic than Scott, but they're very similar in how they effect their offense. Q. How rare is for a guy like J.J. to go from MAC tight end to All-American defensive end in just a couple years? COACH DOEREN: I've never heard of it before, so it's pretty rare. His journey is -- it's unreal, to think that he was 6'4", 210 in high school and nobody recruited him, and now he's 6'6", 290, and everyone is telling him he should leave college early. What he's done is tremendous. Q. Do you remember him in high school, and did you guys look at him at all? COACH DOEREN: We did. You know, obviously he was an offensive guy at the time. I know we talked a lot about him. For whatever reason obviously you'd like to take every guy you can in the state, and we didn't, and I don't remember the conversation specifically because he was an offensive player at the time. I know Coach Bielema puts a lot of time and effort into keeping those guys in the state. Obviously we didn't look very good when he transferred back and became our best player, but it all worked out in the end, you know. Q. What kind of problems does Jeremy Kerley present to a defense? COACH DOEREN: Obviously tackling a guy like him in the open field is the first problem. He's a tremendous athlete. He's a gifted runner. He breaks tackles and makes things happen after the catch. They move him around offensively, too, where you can't just pinpoint where he is all the time. But defensively we have to account for him all the time. The guys know what he's all about and what he presents, and we've got to do a great job of leveraging him and getting a lot of people to him. Q. In previous years when Wisconsin has come out here to the Rose Bowl there was always this question of whether they could handle the speed of the Pac-10 teams. It seems like it's almost the reverse in this situation, how people are looking at it, and I'm curious if you think TCU fits into the style of play that the Big Ten has. Do they remind you of a Big Ten team? CULMER ST. JEAN: Well, watching film to see what TCU puts on film, they remind us of a lot of Big Ten teams. They have a dual offense. They run some similar to Michigan and Purdue and then also have a power type offense like Michigan State, and they also kind of look like Ohio State with the receivers and the type of quarterback they have. So they do -- they're very similar to the teams that we played earlier this season, and it seems like it's a culmination of games that we played, and we're just putting it all together and playing the final game. Q. For Blake and Culmer, obviously you guys lost Chris early in the season. Just as a linebacking group, how did you guys address that and obviously keep it together to get to this point? BLAKE SORENSEN: Yeah, Chris was an unbelievable player, but we've got a lot of talented guys in the linebacking group. I think Coach Doeren really stressed depth as a unit, and it really showed this year that we had a lot of guys play, Culmer and myself and Mike Taylor was in there, he's healthy and he's a great player, so the only thing -- coaching was a lot of it. We prepared that when guys are down, the next guy stepped in, and I think it really helped out. End of FastScripts |
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