Auburn Head Coach Gene Chizik News Conference Quotes
December 31, 2009
Opening statement:
“It’s the culmination of a great week. We’re coming down to the end here and it’s certainly been just an outstanding five days for our football team and our coaches. As I’ve said before this bowl has been absolutely awesome and I’ve been to a bunch. It’s run first class. Our football team is to the point now that we’re ready to play. When you have your last game close to a month ago, there’s a lot of stuff in between. But now I really feel like our football team is focused in on the last 24 hours, and we need to be. We had a good practice yesterday. We finished yesterday with pretty much our Thursday game week type practice. Today what we’re going to do is walk through and touch some things up, which we need to do. Obviously we’ll be ready to play tomorrow morning. Again, this is the culmination of a great week, but it’s game time, so we’ve got to get ready to play and focus back in on the little things that are going to help us win the football game.”
On the Outback Bowl’s early start:
“We’ve played a couple of early games this year. For us, it doesn’t matter when we play. Both teams are playing at the same time. We played a lot of later games, but we played our share of some earlier ones too. Our players like it and our coaches like it because you don’t have to get up all day and think about it, watch everybody else. You get up, you eat, you go to the stadium and you play, and I think that’s the way our players and coaches would prefer to do it. We like that; we like getting out there and getting it going.”
On the Auburn seniors finishing their careers in the Outback Bowl:
“Our senior class, they’ve been phenomenal. That’s the only word I can tell you because number one, we don’t have many of them. Number two, they’ve been through a lot of stuff now, they’ve been through a lot of stuff at Auburn. If you date back a year ago now, their whole world was turned upside down. They’re at Christmas right now; they’ve got a new football coach after having the same one for 10 years. They don’t know me; they don’t know the coaches we’re getting ready to hire. If you go back a year ago right now there was a lot of stuff going on out there. The way they’ve come and the way they’ve bought into what we want and the way we want to set the groundwork and the foundation for down the road, they have truly laid, in my opinion, they’ve truly laid a great foundation for our younger guys by the way they have carried themselves, the way they have acted. Most of them have graduated already. To me they’ve been phenomenal. They’ve been great for our coaches and they’ve been great for our younger players. Obviously it’s very important for us to go out on a win for them tomorrow for what they’ve put into the university.”
On the perception of Big Ten teams being slower than SEC teams:
“I think that’s somewhat of a myth, I really do. Every case is different. You can sit there and try to compare. Look at Miami and Wisconsin. Miami is certainly not short on speed. Wherever that came from and however that came, I think that’s blown out of proportion. Everybody’s got great athletes. Everybody’s got great speed. If you’re playing in a January 1 bowl or you’re playing in a bowl game, period, no matter what league you’re in, Big Ten or SEC, you’re going to have a football team full of great athletes. That’s just how I believe.”
On the challenge of the Northwestern passing game:
“It’s going to be a very huge challenge for us. They’re throwing for about 260 yards a game, so they’re doing something right. They’re running for another 120 a game. Their passing game, when it’s on and it’s clicking, they’re protecting, which they do a good job of protecting their quarterback. Probably the best thing he does is he gets rid of the football. When you choose to blitz, you’ve got to be prudent about when you do that because they do a great job of picking that up. We’ve had our secondary challenges over the year. So that will be a great challenge for us. We know they’re going to throw the football, there’s no question about it. They’ll try to run it some too. They’ve got a great scheme and obviously they’ve got a guy that’s really good at what he does. The challenge is certainly set for us, but we feel good about it. We feel great about our plan and we feel great about the challenge.”
On the fast tempo of both offenses:
“The tempo from our offense right now, we’re going to be as fast as we need to be. Again, that changes with circumstances in the football game. This could be a game that goes really, really quick, I don’t know, we’ll see. It’s going to be really interesting. It’s two different types of offenses, but the potential tempo could be very similar.”
