Texas Longhorns College Football Pregame Quote, 09/09/2019

Really to want start by thanking our student body. What an unbelievable atmosphere. They were there extremely early, they were loud. They had an impact on the game, and, again, those efforts do not go unnoticed by our staff and certainly our players. So students, job well done. Keep up the good work! That’s what a college football atmosphere is supposed to feel like.

That being said, obviously we had a lot to learn from Saturday night’s ball game. Our guys are very eager to get back to work, turn the page and move on to going 1-0 this week.

Updated injury, B.J. Foster will be out at least a couple weeks with a pretty significant hamstring issue.

Coach, now that you saw the film, how much of the concern with your secondary was about LSU and how much is it about that these guys have a lot to learn? How fixable is it?

It’s very fixable. We’ve got talented players that care. Part of it’s not ‚Äì when you complete passes, it’s not always on the secondary. We had some linebackers that were out of position in underneath coverage as well.

And let’s not discount the fact that Joe Burrow had about as good of a game as I ‚Äì he threw the ball in spots and in places with the amount of accuracy, it was something to see. We gotta do better, though. We’re going to face really good receivers and really good quarterbacks in this league.

We’re also not ready to sound all the alarms just set, knowing the caliber of what we just played and knowing that the improvements are not ‚Äì like you said, they’re certainly fixable.

Coach, can you talk about Devin Duvernay? What an outstanding game he had and made a big splash on the national scene.

I don’t know about the national scene part, but I know he’s on my leadership council. I don’t know another way to say it, but the anger he runs with once he has the ball in his hands and the physicality is so impressive for a slot receiver. I’m glad he’s on our team.

I’m glad he is fully bought in, fully committed, compelled, even, at this point in his career, and, yeah, I would expect much of the same from him.

Tom, Keaontay is an introspective, cerebral-type running back and he studies himself and the game. He would be the first to admit he left some plays on the field. How do you keep him up? His body language didn’t look too good leaving the field Saturday.

Yeah, it wasn’t. Just talk, educate. There is no magic pill that I’m going to give him that’s going to, you know, rectify anything. He knows, one, he needs to respond to adversity in game; two, I told the whole team yesterday, and it applies certainly to Keaontay, you’ve only failed once you stop learning from your mistakes and improving. That’s when you’re a failure. Making mistakes is part of life and it’s part of growing.

You’ve got to use mistakes as feedback, get criticism from the experts, which are your coaches, and then apply that feedback and criticism and go improve. So the only way you can fail is if you don’t improve from and learn from your mistakes, and I fully believe that Keaontay plans on doing that.

What did you see from your running back, Roschon Johnson? And the other guys that have been out for a while, can you update us on them?

RoSchon looks like he’s been doing it for a while, right? It’s been 15 days of his life that he’s played that position, and he went out against what I think is a potentially top-10 defense, as good of a defense as we have played in a while.

He didn’t flinch. He made some nice runs. He finishes on contact really, really well. I was continually happy with his progress. I think Coach Drayton has done a marvelous job getting him up to speed, and certainly the kid has the “want to,” the desire, and the physical traits to do it.

There really isn’t an update. Danny and Kirk probably ‚Äì the likeliest is whoever we play after the bye week, I’m not sure. I think Oklahoma State, that would be a bit of a pipe dream at this point.

Tom, at least statistically speaking, you’re starting three defensive linemen with little experience and don’t have a sack. How much is that complicating things?

None. Malcolm Roach and Keondre Coburn were absolutely ‚Äì they had a very, very good game. They were very disruptive. Stats don’t matter for defensive linemen. Do you disrupt the offense, and if the answer is yes, you’re doing your job.

Now that you have reviewed it, what do you think of the safety play and the way that Jefferson and those guys were getting open over the middle?

Again, those are two separate entities. I think we’re all assuming it was the secondary’s fault that people were open. That’s not a fair assumption until you know what each coverage call was and who’s responsibility that is.

We’ve got to get better everywhere on that side of the ball, including us as coaches. If that means we’ve got to dial back a little bit, so be it. Obviously we’re facing a much different animal this week in terms of what Rice is going to do offensively, so won’t get to test that much this week. The entire team, we’ve got to get better, and they are part of that team.

Coach, how many conversations have you had since Saturday picking up your players, talking to the staff about that particular subject, that the season isn’t over after this loss?

I don’t know how many conversations, but it’s certainly been discussed. There will never be moral victories at Texas, but there are a lot of positive things we can glean from that game.

Certainly offensively, considering the caliber of defense and caliber of defensive players that we were going up against, yeah, this is a preconference game that has no bearing on our standing in our conference, and we will be a better team for having played that game, and I’m glad we did. There is a lot, a lot of positive that will come from that game having been played.

Coach, you guys really looked like y’all belonged in the spotlight the other night. Did you get that from the preparation and the after affects, even though you lost, what it was like in the locker room, and talk about Sam Cosmi a little bit. He had a great game on the offensive line.

Yeah, but our goal is not to just belong. Our goal is to win those things, and I get there is a bit of PTSD around here for the prior decade or so, but I told our team, in three years we have come this far, and we’ve got this far to go to be elite, and that last bit is the hardest part; right?

We’re getting there. Then I thought our offensive line played great. Played great. Derek Kerstetter held his own as well as Sam Cosmi, and I thought all five of those guys of any of the position groups on the entire team, knowing what they were playing against, they did a really, really good job.

I was curious about your concern of missed tackles in the game. I wonder how many y’all had.

I don’t know the answer to that.

Was that a concern?

You’re going to miss tackles against elite athletes. As long as we’re running to the football ‚Äì you’re always going to get better at tackling, so yes, it is a concern, but nobody that has ever played defense has never missed a tackle. So you’re going to miss tackles, but are your other ten guys running with their hair on fire to get there to have your back, and I did see that on Saturday night.

Coach, seems like going back to last season and this season, your team continues to fight. You’re down 20-7 at halftime and they came back and made it a game that was there for the taking. What are your thoughts on your team’s heart?

Love it. We’re getting to the point, you know ‚Äì the team last year, it’s well documented, I thought we were a bit overachievers, and that’s a compliment. So when you increase your development and you increase your talent pool, you increase your culture, and you still have that overachiever mentality of playing hard and fighting and scrapping and all that, that’s when magic starts to happen.

I was really, really proud of the effort and the physicality of our team. There was not a ‚Äì we were fine. The locker room at halftime? We didn’t ‚Äì there was nobody feeling like we weren’t in the game.

As good as Sam has been and as good as he’s grown into this role at starting quarterback, where do you want to see him get better?

I don’t know. You know, a guy that has 500 yards of offense and 5 touchdowns, you’ve got to stop yourself, because even he would tell you that wasn’t ‚Äì he was a bit off at times. You’ve got to temper your expectations, I think, sometimes. Probably from a fundamental thing, more consistently accurate. There are times when he throws some beautifully accurate balls, and then there are a few that get away from him for one reason or another. But other than that, I love having him on our team.

Is that second corner spot going to be something that you go week-to-week with? I know it wasn’t the best game for the secondary, but how would you assess the performance of Jalen, Kobe, Anthony, all those corners in the most recent game?

Not great. Certainly 471 yards is not all on the corners. We’ve got to get a lot of things fixed. We’ve got to make some improvement there, and the first part of your question, yeah, they will continue to have competition and we will see who, if anybody separates that other corner spot.

If you had to do it all over again, would you dial up the blitz on third and 17? Second question is: Do you guys have to resist any urge of trying to make huge changes when it’s only after one game, second game of the season and only a seven-point loss?

Honestly, we don’t live in a world of “what ifs” or should‚Äôve, would‚Äôve, could‚Äôve’s. We made the call, felt like the right call at the time. The quarterback was falling on one of his offensive linemen, and he threw it in the receiver’s hands. He made a great play.

We don’t ever as coaches think about should‚Äôve, would‚Äôve, could‚Äôve, and we’re into year three right now. You guys all wanted me to fire coaches and change this and change that after an entire season, and we stayed the course and one game, a seven-point loss to the No. 4 team in the country, we’re going to be okay. We’re going to figure out where we need to improve and improve it.

Tom, an ideal setting, where would you say Cameron Dicker’s range is, and did you think about sending him back out there for the LSU timeout after that 58-yarder?

I thought about it. I think especially – he had a little bit of breeze behind him. I mean, we did a two-minute drill in training camp and he hit a 57-yarder, walk-off, with two seconds left.

I think game on the line, like if we were down two and you got to lineup for a 57, 58, 59-yarder, we would probably do it rather than throw a Hail Mary, but at that time after they called a timeout, I figured they were going to get their field goal return team set up, and if we missed it, we were going to have a bunch of 300 pound guys covering a guy returning a kick, so it felt like the right thing to do, to jog the punt team out.

What’s the significance in your stop at Rice in your coaching career and the fact that you get to take your team to Houston to play a game Saturday?

I don’t know what the significance is. We have extremely fond memories of our time there. We lived in Missouri City and Sienna Plantation, had great neighbors. Obviously the administration there was great, Chris Del Conte, that’s where we first connected and where I first found Yancy McKnight, so I think that’s pretty significant.

It’s exciting for ‚Äì anytime you play in a pro stadium, too, it’s exciting for our players and knowing how many Houstonians we have on our team, it’s exciting to go back and play a ball game.

When you were at Houston, y’all had the H-Town takeover, a huge deal, and you were laser focused on getting Cady, and everybody in that area, and here you continue to gobble up Houston recruits. I know Houston’s importance in the state, but in your mind how important is it that y’all try to get as many guys out of there as possible?

Yeah, it’s something maybe makes for good Monday morning quarterback talk, but it’s not something we every talk about, like we have to get this region or that region. We want to sign great players. If they’re in Texas, great; if they’re in Houston, great; if they’re in Dallas, great; if they’re in Victoria, great. But we don’t prioritize one region over another in the state.

Because this is Rice’s game, y’all can’t have host recruits there, right?

Are we the road team? Then, yeah, we could not have ‚Äì even when we’re the home team, like in the Red River game, we can give them tickets, but we can’t talk to them.

Tom, talk about what B.J. Foster has brought to this defense and who takes over for him.

Well, I think ‚Äì yeah, he’s extremely physical with good size and speed, good instincts. We’ve got to coach him better on some of the details. DeMarvion would be the likely candidate. The good thing is that’s by far our deepest position on the team. With Chris Brown playing as well as he has, Josh Thompson has played a lot of football and DeMarvion. B.J. was playing a lot for a reason, but there is certainly some good options in that room.