Phillip Fulmer Comments from December 28 News Conference

On his respect for Penn State and coach Joe Paterno:
“I think it goes without saying how much respect and admiration I have for coach Paterno and all his accomplishments as a coach, but even more so as a person because coach has also been indirectly a mentor to a lot of us in the profession. His legendary record is one thing, but he’s done it the right way. He’s a man I have a great respect for. Having played against him once as an assistant and once as a head coach and once as a player, I certainly know what kind of teams he puts on the field. We have a great respect for the Penn State football team this year, and we’re excited about playing the game and such a great Penn State team."

On Tennessee’s Outback Bowl preparations:
“Our preparations have gone well in Knoxville. We balanced it I think well with all the finals and everything that we had to deal with there. When it was time to work, we worked. Our kids have been very responsive to that and I think they’re excited about the challenge and the opportunity to finish the season with 10 wins, hopefully, and play well. We did not play particularly well in our last ballgame. We certainly want to do much better and we’ll have to do much better. Penn State’s easily one of the top two or three teams that we’ve played this year offensively and defensively as well as the kicking game.”

On Erik Ainge being liked by his teammates last season:
“You can look at last year and there are so many dynamics in having good chemistry on a football team. We had just come off an eastern division championship and had a lot of players returning. We really felt good about our season and were ranked number three in the preseason. I don’t think it was necessarily Erik not being liked at all. From a personal standpoint, you had a senior, very popular, very outgoing quarterback in Rick’s personality and a youngster trying to come up and make his way. The dynamics of all that, with the injuries, with the schedule and with us not playing as consistently offensively as we thought we should, it just developed. Instead of making plays to win the games, we ended up making the plays that lost the games. It was very complicated I think.”

On Erik Ainge’s development as a quarterback:
“Erik is doing now what I thought he would do last year. The dynamics of it all were very strange. I think he put a lot of pressure on himself trying to distance himself from Rick and not split the time. So he’s trying to make all the plays instead of playing within the system. That was youth and immaturity and our responsibility. A lot of things happened last year along with assuming too much as a whole team that things were just going to go well. Us bouncing back to be where we are right now is a real credit to the program and to the players on this team and to Erik and to (Offensive coordinator/Quarterbacks coach) David Cutcliffe for doing such a good job with Erik.”

On whether the days of coaches staying at a school for decades are gone:
“I’ve been asked that several times. I think coach Paterno can probably answer it better than I can because he’s been there. I can’t see it. If somebody starts really early at a young age; I know coach Bowden was really young. I’ve played against both of them. Coach Osborne is probably in that category as guys that I’ve watched and admired and appreciated. That ’71 game that he was talking about, I had a good friend, Conrad Graham, who was on that team that actually made a couple really good plays that ended up helping us win the game with interceptions, he sent me a copy of the tape. I was watching it with my youngest daughter this summer and we were just having some fun. It hit me because one, it was black and white, and two, because it was the game of the week. In other words, it was the game of the week. I guess it may have been the only game of the week, I don’t know how they did it, I don’t remember back then. Now, there’s so much scrutiny. At eleven o’clock we start and you can watch football until two in the morning. It’s so scrutinized, and everybody’s got the internet and everybody’s got talk shows. There’s so much more involvement with trustees and boosters and people are more accountable and less patient. Coach Paterno never had any of those kinds of issues until the last few years, and he’s bounced back from those. It’s hard for a family to be under that kind of scrutiny. I think we’re looking at legendary coaches in coach Bowden and coach Paterno.”

On the Penn State defense:
“You don’t end up being the number five scoring defense in the country and number 16 overall without having a really fine defensive team. They don’t give up big plays, their linebackers are tremendous and their front is very, very active and they give you problems. They’re very well coached, and as I said, easily one of the top two or three teams that we’ve played this year. The front looks at this point in the season; you’ve seen a lot of things. It’s not necessarily the looks that you get. It’s the people and the active front and the pressure from the linebackers and the secondary just doesn’t make any mistakes.”

On the opportunity to win 10 games this season:
“From where we came from, I would already review the season as a good season. We’re like Penn State. At Tennessee and Penn State and places like that you expect every year to be in the championship mix. Hopefully we can finish the season well with a good win.”

On cleaning up the team over the past year:
“We don’t have enough time to talk about all the things. We obviously went through a tough time last year with some things that were embarrassing. You take a church choir and you’re going to have some issues from time to time. We had more than our share of things come up in 2005 that were a distraction to us. We had that unusual year. It’s just literally an approach and a mindset that we’re not doing this. It’s counterproductive to what all of us are here for, to get an education and have a great social experience and grow as a young man. We had issues and we dealt with them quickly and firmly and I think the message was spread pretty fast from that standpoint.”

On the Volunteers’ defense woes:
“We’ve got a ton of issues and problems particularly defensively. We haven’t played at the level defensively this year as we have in the past. A lot of that movement and blitz and all those different looks are strictly out of that’s what we have to do to hold up to some degree. We have great concern going into this game with their running game and being able to stop that. Last time we played they pushed us around a bunch. I am very concerned about that again. We know that they’re really good. We have focused on the fundamentals as much as we can. We have not really played particularly well since Cal and Alabama and a couple times where we did play well against the run. We have not been a team that has been able to consistently stop a good rushing team. It’s a challenge to our guys, and they will be challenged against Penn State.”