 
Tracking Mack: Nov. 3
Nov. 3, 2010
Opening statement: Saturday is National College Football Day for the American Football Coaches Association, so all of the coaches in America will be wearing a lapel pin to bring awareness to cancer research. They have asked all of us that we say that in our press conferences and make sure that the awareness is there. We talked a lot to our team yesterday about Kansas State, and really, the lack of success that we have had against Kansas State since we have been here. We are 2-4 as a team. We are 1-4 in Manhattan. It has not been a game that we have played well. They have played well in the ballgame, so this team really has a chance to step up and do something in Manhattan that very few other teams have done, and that is come out of there with a win. We have talked a lot about Marcus Tubbs with the last second field goal, when we won 17-14. Cedric Benson and [Kansas State RB] Darren Sproles were the two tailbacks in that game. There were a lot of great players from both teams. Both teams were [ranked in the] top-20. Dakarai Pearson also had eight tackles in that game, and Dakarai is back on our staff now, so they have been talking to the kids because nobody on our football team has ever been to Manhattan Kansas. It will interesting to them, as this will be their first trip. Practice was very intense yesterday. We have to do a great job of stopping the running game because their runner is such a great player. It was a very physical practice—one of the more physical practices that we have had. The defense is obviously challenging themselves to slow him down because he is such a great player, but we also feel like we have to run the ball and be balanced in this ballgame because when we have been able to do that this year, it has helped us.
We talked about Darius White on Monday. We wanted him to play more. His mother had a really bad car wreck on Monday—thank goodness she is okay—so he had to go home. He missed practice yesterday and spent time with her and the family, and she is okay, so he came back today. He will get his first practice today, so hopefully he can get back and get a lot done. It is interesting with a freshman because they have not been in the game playing or haven’t done as many things. It is harder for them to miss practice. Ashton Dorsey—we want him to play more—and last week he had the flu and did not practice on Tuesday, so it set him back some and hopefully he can play more. Jackson Jeffcoat is still struggling with his ankle. Yesterday in practice, he was very, very limited. We will just have to look at him again this week. Sometimes ankles can really slow you down and keep you from being able to push off, and obviously, every position in football has to be a position where you can push off and explode, and he has not been able to do that yet. Kyle Kriegel is a young man that we moved from defense to offense. He hurt his shoulder in practice. It has been bothering him through the years, and he had it operated on last week. He will probably miss spring practice, so that will set him back. We were hoping that he could be out there and be involved more in spring practice. Kickoff returns and punt returns have been issues for us this year. We have two guys on the team who have returned kickoffs for touchdowns. You start looking at Marquise Goodwin against Texas A&M and D.J. Monroe with two touchdowns last year, and we really haven’t even gotten close to one yet [this year]. Kansas State leads the country in kickoff returns. They are number one, so it is a huge issue to try and match their production in kickoff returns this week. As we said, D.J. is going to still work on it, but he needs to make some yards here. We have to help him, and the front has to block better. It is just another area that we have not done as well this year as we have in the past. Marquise has been hurt. He has had something banged up all year, so we haven’t put him back there as much. They have all been minor things, but you do not want him taking the impact hits that you get on kickoff returns. Christian Scott has been working on it, and he is a guy who will be back there as well. Right now, unless something changes before the game, we will still try with D.J., but if it is not working, you have to change it and get some more combinations, and we are looking at that. With punt returns, you are going to a place with a really good punter again—seems like this league is known for punters this year. It is a place where the ball swirls, so it is hard to put a new, young guy out there. Duane Akina and I were talking about it this morning. It is really interesting that we have always had a punt returner with Nathan Vasher and Quan Cosby and Jordan Shipley and Aaron Ross. They have always been natural catchers, so it has not been an issue for us. We thought it would be Earl Thomas this year, but we also thought that it would be an easy transition into Aaron Williams and Curtis Brown, and it has been tough for them. It is just different for some people. It is really interesting that we have had trouble finding the right combinations back there. Right now, we would either put Adrian Phillips back there or Kenny Vaccaro. They are the two in the first practice yesterday who did the best, but we will probably have a first time catcher again out on the field at Kansas State, and that is a tough scenario to put them in. You look at the Baylor game, the Iowa State game, and the OU game and all of them were eight points or less. You go back and we played very poorly against Iowa State and still had a chance to come back and win in the fourth quarter. We played a poor first half against Oklahoma and had our opportunities in the second half and did not capitalize again. Against Baylor, we were up 19-10. We have a fourth-and-three. We go for it and get an offensive pass interference penalty, so we punt. We come back and hold them. We come back down and miss a field goal. Either one of those points—whether its three or seven—that is 10 points on the board that could have put Baylor in trouble, made them one-dimensional, and made them start throwing the ball every play because they were not moving the ball consistently. They were getting big plays. Then they come down and score the 69-yard run, and we do not answer. We do not take the momentum back. Our kickoff return was bad. We have the ball that hits Greg Smith and pops up. They get it and score. Then we do not come back and answer. Twenty-four times in our 12 years here, we have come from behind and won in the second half. Thirteen times we have done that in the fourth quarter. This team has to continue to look at answering and changing that momentum. Sudden change was better after the interception by Greg Smith, where the ball popped up in the air. The defense fought them and fought them and fought them, and finally, they did score, but that is showing some fight coming back. We have to come back and learn how to play better in the second half and go back and learn some of the basic fundamentals that have helped us here, and that is fighting from behind, changing momentum, and playing sudden change better. Those are things we need to do. We worked for a long time yesterday on redzone offense and trying to put in some new thoughts and just change things, again, that we are doing. We are obviously not going to sit here and say what we did, but we are trying really hard to correct that problem because that has been the biggest problem on offense. It is something that we have to get corrected. We had five or six trips in the red zone last week and score one touchdown. That is just unacceptable. We also feel like that has put a tremendous amount of pressure on the defense. We have gone back and looked at it. There are 100 more runs against us this year than this time last year. Last year, we would get ahead of teams, and they would have to throw the ball, and you could put pressure on the quarterback. We had a lot more sacks, and we had tipped balls and balls knocked loose. Right now, people are running it more. They are trying to keep the game closer. They are not having to take the chances with their offense that they did last year, and we still had five balls that we knocked loose and were on the ground the other night and only got one. We can still do a better job with turnovers, but we need to get ahead of somebody, so it will put more pressure on them and make them try to throw more. The other thing is, the big plays that we gave up the other day—we are in position and so close with {Baylor QB] Griffin getting hit and the ball getting knocked loose—we obviously have to do a better job on one-on-one situations on third down. Will [Muschamp] has to blitz some. He has to change it up, but we have to cover. Our corners have been covering good. The other night, our safeties had trouble in that area. There are a few things that we can fix that will make a tremendous difference with this football team. The other thing that is really important is we are going to have to be a really tough football team on Saturday night. Bill Snyder always has a well-coached football team. They are very tough. They are going to run the ball. They have tight splits. There is not much dodging. When you get enough people committed to the run, he is going to have a double move outside and a trick play to try and take your eyes away from your secondary and the discipline away from your secondary and make the deep play. We have to be able to protect Garrett [Gilbert] and run the ball. We thought Garrett made tremendous improvement last week, so we need to grow on that. We need to continue to have him make plays with his feet. We also felt like that it was important to tell you that Sam Acho has played great. He has been as good of a player as we have had at that position each week. Keenan Robinson has had a great year. Emmanuel Acho was playing great until he got his knee hurt, and we need to get him back and get him well, but he is still fighting and still competing to do the things at the highest level he can. Curtis Brown has had a great year at corner. He has had the year that we thought he would have, and he has been banged up a lot. Christian Scott has had a great year. A lot of people question him with an angle he took at Iowa State and thought he played bad. He actually graded a winning performance in that game. He just had a bad play, and he played well against Baylor as well. Garrett, we feel like, is making lot of improvement. Michael Huey was playing great—the best he has played since he has been here before he got hurt. David Snow has graded a winning performance every week. He is doing really, really well, and we are proud of him. You look at Tre’ Newton. Tre’ has graded a winning performance every week. Those guys are really, really playing hard and not getting any credit for it because of the fact that we have not won as many games. On whether S Kenny Vaccaro or S Adrian Phillips returned punts in high school: Kenny was a great receiver in high school. In fact, when we took him, we did not know whether he would be a receiver or a safety. He has great hands. Adrian was actually a receiver and quarterback in high school, so he has played everywhere. We feel like both of those guys now have played in big games, even on the road, because Adrian played a lot at Nebraska and Kenny has played a lot for two years. We do not think that they will be nervous about the opportunity. On instructing players when to catch the ball on punt returns: I made a mistake probably with them after UCLA. I jumped the group for letting the ball bounce in the UCLA game. It took about a 30-yard bounce. Seems like every one that bounces is going 30 yards in the wrong way. I was all over them about catching it. They are trying so hard, and they probably pressed again and tried to catch some balls they should not have. The ball that Curtis tried to catch the other night was a 68-yard punt. I do not know if I have ever seen a 68-yard punt in the air, so again, because I got on them so much after UCLA, that was probably part of the problem. On explaining to the players the importance of still playing for a bowl game: What we did on Sunday was we sat and told them these things are fair. We’re out of the Big 12 South. We’re out of the Big 12 and we’re not going to be in a BCS Bowl. So those things, for you young ones that don’t understand it, are gone - period. What we’ve got is an opportunity that we have four games on our schedule that are left. We went through them: at Kansas State, back home at Oklahoma State, Florida Atlantic here and the Thanksgiving game. You have a chance to win eight games if you win four in a row. You have a chance to win a ninth if you go to a bowl and win. You also have a chance to lose those four games, and if you do you won’t go to a bowl [game]. If you win six, you’ll go to a bowl. Some emails have said, “What’s left to play for? Why would we even go to a bowl? Do we have to go?” Well, you want seniors to go to a bowl. We’ve got a streak of bowl [games] going and at the same time, you get 13 practice days. For such a young team, that is critical for us. So we do need to be in a bowl. I don’t care where it is or what its name is. You go back and look at Alabama who was in the Independence Bowl three years ago at 6-6. Last year - the name of the bowl’s changed - but Southern Cal was in the Emerald Bowl at 7-5. We do want to get to a bowl. We also told them that you’ve proven that you can beat anybody on your schedule that’s left, and you have proven that you can lose every game. So you better start looking at Kansas State and try to get this thing flipped and get it back in a positive. They’ve been really good. I worried about them at Iowa State. They practiced hard last week and they were attentive. I didn’t know what would happen coming out of Baylor on Tuesday, but they were really attentive and good and excited about practice yesterday. Hopefully we have made some progress off the field with the attention, and they understand. I told them there’s at least two games that obviously if we would have played just a little bit better we could have won, or if we would have been excited about. And that’s inexcusable for us. There’s two others that if we would have done the right things in the game, we could have won. All four games are on us, it’s not on anybody else. I still say, if you play like you did at Nebraska you can beat anybody on your schedule. If you don’t, then we’re not as good. On the younger players handling adversity: I don’t think the young guys worry about it. They like to play. Lou Holtz always said something at a clinic I heard that makes sense, “Seniors want to win. It’s their legacy. It’s what they’ll be remembered for. So they’re fighting so hard to get it fixed. Juniors would like to win. They want to play. Freshman and sophomores [just] want to play.” They’ve got plenty of time left so there’s not as much urgency sometimes with young players, and that’s repeating Lou Holtz. That’s not just what I said. Joe Paterno told me once, “For every freshman that you start, you lose a game.” I remember, I was at North Carolina and we started 11 [freshman] and lost 10 [games]. I figured that next year I shouldn’t start any freshman, let them come in after the next play so if they come in the second play they’re not starters. I do think that the older ones, after Iowa State, got a hold of the younger ones and said, “We’re not going to allow you to not finish this thing right.” People have said, “Do you throw all the older ones out?” That’s not fair. If an older one’s not practicing well, he’s not playing well - you don’t play him. But if he’s doing his job, it’s a bad message to your younger ones that if they become seniors and the team’s not playing good and you’re playing great, you bench them. So we’re not going to do that. People have asked, “Do we still have the same accountability system and if a guy doesn’t practice well he moves down?” Absolutely. Every day. In fact, we’re even grading every scout teamer now, and if a scout teamer doesn’t grade a winning performance he doesn’t get to dress. We’ve taken it to every player on the team now, not just the ones that are playing. This week - and we’ve never done this before - but because our receivers are dropping too many balls and tight ends are dropping too many balls, from the minute they walk out on the field we have someone counting every pass that’s thrown to them and everybody who drops one. Usually you just do that in competition - you don’t do it in every drill. Every ball that’s thrown to every receiver or tight end now is being marked down and calculated, and we’re trying to figure out why we’re having five guys drop a ball. If it was one guy dropping five balls, you can fix it easier but it’s not. So we’re trying to get their attention as well. On having theories about the dropped balls: We’ve been over it and over it and over it. There is absolutely nothing that we can see except there is too many guys dropping a ball. James Kirkendoll makes a great catch down the sideline and then drops the other one. It makes no sense. On the dropped balls becoming psychological: I think the offense is pressing. We’ve been scoring 39 points a game [in the past] and [now] we’re scoring in the low 20s and we’re not scoring touchdowns. We have all talked so much about the receivers dropping balls. They hear that. I figured the only thing we can do is try to do something else to prove to them that if they will focus every minute of every play in practice and catch every ball, then it’s easier to catch them in the games. On the dropped balls taking a toll on QB Garrett Gilbert: It hurts our momentum, and it wears on everybody. I talked to a coach at a place like Texas that’s no longer coaching - he got fired there - this week and it was interesting. He called me and he said, “I watched your Baylor game and you guys had so many chances to win that game, you just didn’t win it. I remember my guys got so uptight because everybody was after them so much, and your coaches were competing so hard and you were competing so hard and the other bunch was kind of over there knocking around. They’d have a ball bounce on the turf and nobody would say anything about it, and they’d pick it up and throw it and it would be completed. They made about five plays in the game, and you all run up and down the field and you’re making [plays] the whole time and they’re happy because they won, and there’s so many chances for you to have won the game.” So we’ve got to go back and have the kids have more fun, and we’ve got to keep the intensity and have the kids have more fun and regain their confidence and there’s a lot of fine lines in that. My job’s been easy the last two years because we’ve won a lot of games, and I wasn’t needed. Right now I’m needed, because I have to step up and get things thing turned back where the kids are playing hard each week, [and] they’re playing with confidence but they’re also having fun with each other and those are all gray things. They’re things that are hard to get fixed. It’s like the President of the United States has a press conference on the economy and there are so many things that need to be fixed. Number one, all we want to know is how you’re going to fix it, and the other thing we want to know is how fast is it going to get done? That’s kind of like football coaches. If it was that easy - if I could give you three things of how we were going to fix them. What I’ve given you is the red zone offense is in trouble, and we’re practicing on it a lot more every day and we’re changing some things we’re doing. Turnovers - forcing turnovers is a problem. We don’t know what to do about that. Try to stop the run and get ahead and force more passes. We’re trying to strip it. We’re trying to knock it loose, but that’s not easy to do. We’ve got play better on third-downs defensively and not give up the big play. We’ve got to play better offensively on third-downs and try to stay on the field. Kicking game has been great or awful. We need to get some more consistency in the kicking game. When you have a year like this, the people that want to beat you up are negative and say everything’s bad. Everything’s not bad. There are a lot of great things that are going on. There are a lot of great young players. There are a lot of guys that are making plays. What we’re not doing is playing well enough as a team, coaching well enough as a group right now to get all the things done that need to be done. That’s what we’ve got to get done. Everybody wants to hear the three points that are going to get it fixed and it will get fixed Friday at noon. That’s not the way it works. We fixed it at Lincoln and it leaked at Iowa State, so we had to go fix some more holes. I didn’t know they were going to pop back up. On struggling to beat any opponents at North Carolina like Texas has struggled with Kansas Sate: We couldn’t beat Virginia at Virginia and Virginia couldn’t beat us in Chapel Hill. It was the weirdest thing. This was the first time, I think, this year that North Carolina’s won in Charlottesville since 1981. I don’t know why that stuff happens. Why do we win in Lincoln? I don’t know. That’s one of the things in sports that I’ve never understood is why some people play better against somebody else. I think when you beat them enough the kids get that feeling that it’s going to be good and the other team gets that feeling that, oh my gosh, this hasn’t been good. That’s where I think history does matter. You have to change it. I thought we we’re going to win [in Lincoln]. Of course I think we’re going to win all the time. On the job Bill Snyder has done at Kansas State: I have said many times that Bill Snyder may be the best coach to ever coach college football. He’s taken something at Kansas State that nobody else could consistently fix and he fixed it. Now he’s doing it again. It’s amazing. He just walks out there, and I guess it helps when your name’s on the boulevard and your name’s on the stadium. Everybody feels like you’re pretty good at what you do when you walk in. I always feel like it’s kind of like the wizard when he walks out there at 71-years old. It’s kind of like they all wait and see when he walks in. He doesn’t say much. People talk about emotional coaches. Bill’s emotional, but you’d never see it. You’d never hear it. He always wins and gets it done. He’s very, very sound. I was the offensive coordinator at Iowa State when he was the offensive coordinator at Iowa back in the late 70s and early 80s, and he and I recruited the same areas, so I got to know him really well then. When he took the Kansas State job everybody said he’s crazy, he won’t make it. Now they’ve got the stadium named after him. I don’t think you can find another place in America where a guy has stayed as long, been as consistently good and especially left and came back, and now he’s fixing it again. He just amazes me. I love him to death. He’s the only one near my age now. He and I sit together at the Big 12 meetings. On Coach Brown originally thinking Snyder was crazy for taking the Kansas State job: Oh yeah. I was in the Big Eight [Conference] when he took it. All of us thought he was crazy. It was like, “Are you kidding me?” On Will Muschamp getting emotional during postgame: I think that number one, myself and Bill Powers and DeLoss [Dodds] wanted Will to be the next coach and he will be, and he’ll do a great job. I’m not at all concerned about that. Being a head coach is very difficult. I saw it [the video]. Somebody pulled it up for me and showed it to me, and I thought he did fine. It’s funny that people want your coaches to be really emotional. They want you to be passionate. They want you to be tough and then when you answer a question about losing, that I thought he answered very well because we all do think it stinks and we don’t like it - somebody said he was emotional? I mean, my gosh. That’s kind of like saying you ask your coordinators to get the guys to play hard and people think, “What, what did he say? I can’t believe he said that, my gosh.” That’s the same thing, and I told Will that some people will have responses to everything you say and do and I wouldn’t really worry about it. You have to be yourself. As long as you always tell the truth and be yourself, if somebody doesn’t like it they’ll get over it. But I thought it was very appropriate, and I thought it was fine. I don’t think he did anything wrong. Two years ago he might have done something differently, but I thought he did real well. When I heard it and then I saw it, I said, “Oh, that’s fine. That’s minor.” On the offensive line struggling with injuries: In [2007] - I talk too much about ‘07 I’m sure -but in ‘07 we had a bunch of injuries because I remember in the game at Central Florida, Cedric Dockery with a sore knee played 95 plays and in that game Chris Hall played all five positions. That was the year that we had to move everybody around. Chris got hurt. We ended up playing Tray Allen at left tackle, and I can’t remember, somebody else had to step in at center just for that ballgame. We just had to move them around because Tony Hills had gotten hurt and Chris Hall had gotten hurt, but this has been a year that’s forcing us to play a lot of young guys. We’ll start two freshmen Saturday, and we’ve never had to do that. We’re trying to get more two-deep here at the end. Guys are tired, and they’re banged up. We need to get Garrett Porter in the game more. We’ve said that, and we’ve done it some. We haven’t done it a lot. Trey Hopkins has played a whole lot so he’ll start at left guard, but he’s played a lot. It’s not close with him. Thomas Ashcraft played some the other day, and we also need to get Paden Kelley in. He’s doing a lot better in practice. He’s 295 pounds now. He’s showing good feet in pass protection, so we talked about it as a staff this week. We’re going to try and get him some reps in the ballgame as well. On schools like Kansas State having to recruit junior college players: I don’t know. Bill [Snyder] would have to answer that. I’ve never gone that route and it’s a great route and there’s some great players - there’s some great kids - but I felt at North Carolina and at Texas it wasn’t the way to do it. That’s just been my opinion, and I really don’t know enough about it because I’ve never done it. I don’t even know where the junior colleges are by-and-large. On WR Darius White’s absence affecting his playing time against Kansas State: We don’t know. He missed practice yesterday, and we’re playing James Kirkendoll out there some along with Malcolm [Williams] and one of the problems with getting Darius in is, if you play James and Malcolm then you’re probably not going to play a third receiver out there much. Bobby [Kennedy] and I and Greg [Davis] talked about it this morning, and we’re going to see how it is. He hasn’t been to bed in two days. I’m sure and he had to take the kids to school and he had to be mom for two days. He was getting back today, I hadn’t heard if he did, but he was supposed to be back by noon today. So hopefully he’ll be able to come out and practice and do well and get back on track. We’ll just have to wait and see how he does today. We thought he made more progress last week than we’ve seen him make, and we want to see the same thing this week because we’d like to have him rest Malcolm some.
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