texassports.com | Mack Brown press conference transcript: Jan. 31

Mack Brown press conference transcript: Jan. 31

The gist of it all:

Coach Brown wanted to have a press conference so that he could talk about the hiring process and leave Wednesday's National Signing Day to focus on the new recruits. So Coach Brown takes everyone through the hiring and evaluation process. He talks a lot about evaluating himself and in typical Mack fashion, takes the blame for almost everything.

I said last year [that] I’m responsible for everything that happens. The good and the bad. After 13 years here and 26-plus years as a head coach in college football, sometimes you have to look hard in that mirror and review who you are and what you are and start over. I tried to look at the good things we’ve done, look at things that fell short last year and move forward with it. 

Coach Brown also discusses a survey that he used with the players which was private to him only. It sure would be interesting to get the players takes on what was going on inside the team and the relationships they had with the coaches.

I had a survey from them, and I’m the only one that saw it. It’s something we’ve done two or three times since we’ve been here. We did it after the 2007 season and we ask all the players to put their name on it because we wanted to know who felt what, and that way I could go back and address it with each one that felt like there were concerns or things maybe they misunderstood or why we were doing it. I had them do it about coaches, staff, myself and players. I had people evaluating our players and really everything we were doing from top to bottom. I promised the guys that I would be the only one to see the survey, and I was. As soon as I looked at the survey, I wrote down some thoughts that I felt were right on and I wrote down some of the things that I thought they had given me that they had probably misunderstood, and then I tore them all up the next day and started addressing them individually with some of the players.

Coach Brown also discussed the blitzkrieg by the media, message boards, blogs, etc.:

We were involved in trying to keep our players aware of everything that was happening, which is very, very hard to do now because a lot of things are reported before we even get a chance to report it to our players. You all even know some of it before we do. I told the players that that’s going to change in the future because they’ll have to read some stuff. We can’t get it to them first. There’s just too much information out there. Some of it is honest and true, and some of it’s not. What we will do is follow up with them after something is reported, and then we’ll tell them if it’s actually true or not. But we may not get it to them first, and that’s something we’ve always promised them we would do. Things have changed from that standpoint.

When speaking about the hiring process, Coach Brown comments on how much it has changed since he got to UT. He was surprised with the involvement of agents, the prevalence of multi-year contracts, the rise in assistant coach's salaries, and the popularity of the entire process. He even gives longhorn message boards a shout out by discussing the following of private planes to confirm rumors on new hires.

Things have changed much more. [Assistant Athletics Director for Media Relations] John [Bianco] and [Special Assistant to FB Coach for Communications] Bill [Little] kind of kept me posted on who was following the planes and who followed the wrong planes and everybody seemed to have fun with it, and I thought that was good. There’s so much misinformation out there -when you’re dealing with agents and agents are throwing misinformation out there and some people throw it out there.

Coach Brown also discussed why the hiring process took so long and seemed to be so secretive:

People say, “Why do you care what gets out or who you talk to or when you talked to them?” You always want to protect the guy. If a guy is coming in to interview from his school, his fans are mad [and] his head coach is mad, usually. The assistant coaches with him are all talking to him. His players are upset, and his recruits are upset. It’s not about whether it affects us or not, it affects the other candidate and especially if you don’t hire him. It puts him in a very, very difficult place. Even when it’s reported that he was offered and he wasn’t - it’s a very embarrassing thing for him and that’s why I try to keep that quiet. 

 As a Texas fan you've got to love this quote when Coach Brown talks about the new staff:

In the end we thought we hired a great staff for Texas. The average age was 42-years-old. We tried to hire guys that fit. We tried to hire guys that were on the cutting edge of the new stuff offensively and defensively. And we tried really hard to hire guys that wanted to be at Texas. That’s something that coach [Darrell] Royal told me five or six years ago. Hire guys that want to be there. Hire guys that have earned the right, and they’re excited to be there and that’s fun.

One common theme throughout the interview is the need for the new coaches to come together and hit the ground running for Spring ball:

What has to happen now is; you’ve got a lot of experience, you’ve got a lot of knowledge, and they have to come together as one and start working together as a staff. There’s a lot of success, but they’ve got to bind together. It’s been fun watching them recruit so far.

One of the major achievements for Coach Brown and the remaining coaches was to keep the Top 3 Nationally Ranked 2011 Class together. Although Texas lost 4 Star OL Christian Westerman to Auburn, the rest of the class stuck by their commitments and are expected to sign letters of intent Wednesday. It was touch and go for a while though. Many believe that if Major would have left then this class would have most likely fallen apart. Another great binder was the temporary retention of Coach Akina until a plan could be put in place to announce his departure and subsequent replacement by Jerry Gray. If that step is botched it could have been very damaging. Regardless, it was handled perfectly and Texas expects to sign a #2-#3 recruiting class on signing day.

The recruiting’s been fun. It’s been amazing to me that the class pretty much stayed together and our guys stayed on campus, and after they went home they’ve come back and worked hard to help us recruit.  

Also, really reenergized by going out and recruiting and seeing the parents and the high school coaches and the kids, and the fact that all the kids hung in there with us. I also told them that I’d never been more excited, and that I was starting over. That’s very important for them to know. Thirteen years ago I didn’t know what I was doing, and now I’ve got 13 years of experience with new energy and a restart.

I was very proud of the recruits. For all those recruits to hang in there with you all [the media] calling them and opposing coaches calling them and talking about all the negatives of staff change - they’ve hung in there for Texas, and I thought that was great. I thought they trusted my staff and I to hire the right guys and most of those guys didn’t even waiver, and I’m really, really proud of that fact.

Coach Brown touches briefly on the announcement of the Longhorn Sports Network with ESPN:

The fact that we were able to announce the Longhorn Network joining with ESPN is unbelievable to me. I think it’s amazing to see what Chris Plonsky and Bill Powers and DeLoss [Dodds] were able to put together. There’s nothing like it in sports, which is just unbelievable.

It will, obviously, be great for recruiting, but we think it’s also something to let people have more behind-the-scenes looks at what we do without giving up everything. So we’ve got to look at what that means and where we go with it. 

When asked if winning a national championship caused the staff to press for a second one:

After this year, I think it’s a wake-up call, and it’s something I need to go back to work and worry more about teaching the kids and their experience and developing those young people instead of winning. If you do those things like we’ve done for 12 years, you win. When you start thinking about winning and forget the process, then you get ahead of yourself, and they feel that too.