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Rice University Athletics
Monday Press Conference Transcript
10/15/2007 12:00:00 AM | Football
Oct. 15, 2007
Opening Statement "First off I want to congratulate the University of Houston. Art and his Cougars played hard. I also was really impressed with how hard our guys played from start to finish. When you get an effort and play with that kind of passion like we did on Saturday, good things are going to happen along the way. On offense, I was excited to see Chase (Clement) and Jarett (Dillard) making some big plays. Their production continues to go up as the season goes along. Chase is doing a great job of throwing and running the football. He has done a fantastic job over the last couple of weeks of taking command of the offense. Jarett looked like he had a 50-inch vertical jump. Unfortunately, he didn't come down with the ball, but you can see the kind of effort that he's playing with. Special teams wise it was our best effort of the season. Luke (Juist) had a 45-yard punt average, and we caused two turnovers that were a major part of the game. We still need to work on our kickoff return, but all in all we're getting better. On defense, the guys played as hard as they could for three quarters. We started slow as Houston put together two explosive plays. One was a missed tackle that we need to make. In the fourth quarter, we need to find a way to finish out games. Something that we're looking at right now is to maybe move some kids from offense to defense so we're not as fatigued as we are in the fourth quarter. I'm proud of the overall effort, and our goal is to continue to get better each time we take the field."
On Moving Players from Offense to Defense "I haven't talked to players yet, but they're a couple of wide receivers that played defensive back in high school that we could move over to that side of the ball. I don't know if we can teach them fast enough to do what we need them to do on the field, but we need to come up with some answers over there."
On the Team Resilient Attitude "This football team is in the exact same position it was last season. This is when the team went on the roll. The only difference is that they were 0-2 in conference last season and this season we're 1-1. Everyone in the West Division of the conference has a loss. Our team is resilient and has a great work ethic. There's no doubt about it. They've done everything we've asked as coaches since day one. These young men aren't ever going to give up. That's not in them. They've invested way too much in this program to come over here and not give it their all."
On the Offense Gaining Confidence "I thought both sides of the football had good game plans coming in. We did a good job on offense of keeping Houston's defense off-balanced. Some of that was because of the play action pass and the boots. We through a couple of new plays at them they haven't seen with the boots off of those James (Casey) runs. Things like that really helped us in that game and caused us to break some tendencies that we had coming in. I was excited about that. We had more time to do those sorts of things and go more vertical with our offense. It takes time to stand back there and throw something vertical. We had some time that we hadn't had in the past."
On What Defenses See When They Prepare for Rice's Offense "When you prepare for our team, you have a lot of offensive weapons that you have to prepare for especially the way that Chase took control of the game. He showed his ability to run the football, not only when they were called, but to produce when his receivers were covered. He was our leading rusher against Houston. It's great when your quarterback has those feet that can hurt people when he runs down the field. Chase has a great mind, a great arm and great feet. That's a dangerous combination at quarterback."
On What Stands Out on Tape about Memphis A 6-foot 8-inch receiver for starters. Memphis is a very athletic football team. They're 2-4 right now, but they had a close loss to Ole Miss. They took a very good Arkansas State team down to the wire on the road. They have great team speed on both sides of the ball. They can stack it in on you with their 22 personnel on offense and run powers at you. They also have a lot of gadget type plays so you'll see an explosive football game on Saturday."
