August 26, 2002
On Louisiana-Lafayette:
"I don't have anything to say about them really. I can look at their personnel and look at last year, but they have a new (head) coach, new (assistant) coaches, new schemes, new everything, and I don't know exactly what those are. We try to anticipate what they might be but we won't know until Saturday how they are going to line up and play."
On preparation for Louisiana-Lafayette:
"We will probably practice more offense and defense than we need to, but we are doing it just to cover all the bases. You don't know what they will do. We are anticipating, with a coach coming from Virginia Tech, that they will have a pretty good Virginia Tech influence, but you hire assistant coaches too who will bring ideas with them. So we just don't know, we will have to be flexible in the ballgame and see what they are actually doing on the field. In the opening game I try to stress to our team that most of our focus should be on us, how we are practicing, what level of execution we have. We can't do anything about ULL and don't know enough about them to spend a lot of time on them. What we need to be concerned about is how we are practicing and preparing in being ready to come out and play at a high level."
On the return of Greg Porter from minor league baseball:
"I was pleased to get him back here. I thought that last year he was on his way to becoming a key ingredient to our offense and I thought it really hurt us when we lost him."
On recruiting East Texas kids:
"There is good football in East Texas. We are the closest big university and big time football program to East Texas so it is to me very logical that a young man would play here for his family."
On the offensive system:
"It is unfair to put the blame on the offensive coordinator. What we do on offense has a whole lot to do with what we have done before. Dino calls the play, but in terms of the offense, if it is not worth a flip, it is R.C.'s offense. It is not fair to put that on him. There are five offensive coaches over there. I thought that last year he unfairly took some criticism."
On feelings going in to the season:
"One thing that I have experienced over the years, if you win your last game, if you go to a bowl game and win, that tends to go with you through the spring. Last time we played we had a fun day and you build off of that."
On Mark Farris and his sore arm:
"Hopefully today (Monday) he will be able to throw. We set a limit on his throws this week. I don't think we can go back to business as usual. We will have to be guarded all week in how much we ask him to throw and hopefully it will get better as the week progresses. If it doesn't then obviously we have got to be looking at a starter and a backup because you get in a situation where you are always one play away from playing the next guy. We will know more this afternoon about how he feels."