Mike Leach on Pac-12 coaches call
COUGARS
FROM PULLMAN -- Mike Leach made a brief appearance on today's Pac-12 coaches call. Here's a recap of what he said.
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(Reaction to film of BYU game) "I didn’t think we played with very good tempo. We went out ther tentative, didn’t think we played with good tempo, think we got pressured, missed receivers, we had receivers wandering around. I think we had a certain amount of performance anxiety, lot of guys who had never playd a collge football game before. I think sometimes we tried to do too much. I think we didn’t deal with disappointment real well at times. But I think we’ve got plenty to work on and I think we just need to go out there and worry about what we can do instead of a bunch of extra stuff. Guys go out there and all of a sudden they don’t like what the scoreboard says so they're going o change the way they move around."
(How do you respond to them when they're disappointed?) "We’re not patting a lot of 'em on the back. If you can do it in practice you can do it in the game so if we play like we did Monday’s practice, we certainly would have played better. We squandered opportunities, we finished that drive it could have been different. Defensively we played pretty good the second half … just need to settle in and do what we can do, you know?"
(Is it common to see that in openers?) "I think it’s common for openers. I think it’s common for if you’ve got a lot of guys who have never played college football. With that said, we’re not satisfied with our performance but we played better than several teams that won this last week, there’s no question about htat. We can be satisfied with it and just say we’ll get 'em next time, or be a little more aggressive about changing it. We played I think a top-25 quality team that had a really good front."
(Anything that looked better on film) "I think we played pretty well on defense the second half. The biggest thing that we need to do is just duplicate what we do on the practice field to the game field, which I think that will happen. It’s disappointing it didn’t on Thursday but I think that will happen."
Christian Caple can be reached at christianc@spokesman.com. Twitter: @ChristianCaple