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CUTrevor
2022-12-29 11:57:34
I'll have this morning's press conference with Dabo and Josh Heupel shortly! In the meantime, the transcript is below. THE MODERATOR: Welcome to the Capital One Orange Bowl head coaches' press conference. DABO SWINNEY: Well, lucky day for y'all. I lost my voice, so I don't know where it went. Hopefully I'll find it soon. We've had a great week. Really grateful for all the people that work hard to put this on. It's a great experience for our staff, our families, our players, and I'm sure for both teams there's a lot of work that goes into it, practice areas, and also creating opportunities and experiences, whether it's great places to eat, being able to have a beach day and so forth. Got to go to a basketball game last night. Maybe I lost my voice cheering for the Heat, I don't know. But it's been a great trip. It's two great teams. Tennessee is one of the best teams in the country and has had an amazing year, so it should be a great game. We're thankful to be here and represent the league and represent Clemson in a place that's always been special to our fans and to college football. Thank you all for all that you have done to make it a great week, as well. JOSH HEUPEL: Just want to say thank you to the Orange Bowl committee and South Florida. The hospitality for our program has been absolutely fantastic. It's been a great week. Before we got down here, having played in it and coached in it before, I was able to relate to our players and staff what this week is all about and the opportunities that they were going to have to see South Florida and have a great week of experiences. You guys have rolled out the orange carpet and shown us a great week. We appreciate everything so much and are certainly looking forward to the football game. It's been a long time since Tennessee has been here. Really proud of what this program has done in the last 23 months since our staff arrived. Really proud of our players. Playing a great opponent here tomorrow, and looking forward to that. We've seen a lot of the VFLs, former players, starting to make their way down here and I know our fan base is, too. It's great to see all those former players show up, and I'm looking forward to going out and competing with our football team tomorrow. Q. Dabo, I know you joked about losing your voice last night at the Heat game, but if I'm not mistaken you and Spo have been friends for a minute here, and I'm wondering what the benefit is from coaches kind of learning tricks of the trade when it's different sports and different philosophies, and if you could share a little bit what you've shared with Spo and what you've learned from him. DABO SWINNEY: Yeah, he's a guy I got to know. We have a mutual friend that connected us several years ago, and then he reached out, I don't know, four or five years ago or so and wanted to come to Clemson. That was a really cool thing. He flew in for a day with one of his assistants. Listen, it doesn't really matter what the sport is. If you're in leadership and you're dealing with people, there's so much you can learn, especially when you're in a competitive environment. Even though he's in the pros, especially with basketball, those guys are young guys, so we're dealing with young guys in competitive dynamics, leadership, culture, all those type of things. That's how we first got to know each other, and then we stayed in touch throughout the years. I actually came down with my son to a playoff game last May, and that was pretty cool. I'm 2-0 in '22. I let him know that last night. Brought some good mojo. But it was fun. But I think that's what coaches do is collaborate. I think our profession is really unique that way in that like we have our AFCA convention coming up in another week or so, and all these coaches come from all over. I mean thousands, and we talk and we meet. We literally played Ohio State one year, it was the craziest thing. I think it was the game -- I don't think it was this game. I think it was the game out in Arizona. Not long after that game we met as a staff, their staff, our staff, and we kind of got together and talked through the game. It was crazy. That's one of the cool things about our profession is we compete, but we collaborate and always have. It's not the case in most industries, right. Coke doesn't sit down with Pepsi at the end of the year and say, hey, boys, what did you think? Let's see how this goes. But football coaches do that. There's just so many relationships, and that's what makes the game really unique. Just relationships like that come through collaboration that crosses over the sports and business world, et cetera. Q. I have a question for you both, Coach Swinney and Coach Heupel. What's the impact Mike Reed has had on your staff this year, being recently elevated to assistant head coach? And for you, Coach Heupel, for Tim Banks, you recently added him; what's his impact been for you this year as a defensive coordinator? JOSH HEUPEL: Tim has been a phenomenal leader on the defensive side of the football. When we were going through the process of finding our defensive coordinator two years ago, looking for somebody that had experience that was a great leader, that was multiple in what he was able to do, was relationship driven and had a great ability to teach, for all the things that we encountered when we first arrived on campus, his steadiness, his leadership, his ability to gain buy-in from the guys around him, that's staff members that were coming in. Not everybody had worked together. There was some common threads where there were some previous relationships there. But then getting all of our players to buy in to what we're doing. He's done nothing but do a great job of continuing to grow what we're doing on that side of the football, and you can see that in the way our guys play for him. DABO SWINNEY: Yeah, Mike Reed, he's just a great leader. He's been with me since the 2013 season, so he's just going near 10 or whatever, and has done a phenomenal job. He's coached a bunch of great players at Clemson. He's been a part of some of the best defenses in college football over the last decade. He's coached first-rounders and everything in between. He's a great recruiter, great communicator, really knows the game, but he's also our special teams coordinator, and he's a great friend. Love his family. He's got a great, beautiful family, his wife Kim and Michaela, Milan, his daughters. Just a guy that has really grown and would be a great head coach, as well, so it was easy. We had a lot of staff transition last year for the first time in a while, so it was easy to be able to promote him to assistant head coach and lean on him in a lot of areas. Q. Josh, you've got three players opting out, all good players. You've got your coordinators gone and you've recently had a quarterback change. In a regular season you may have one of those changes in a given week. To have all of them at once, how is the challenge different for you as a coach, and how do you navigate all those changes within one game? JOSH HEUPEL: Yeah, I think at the end of the day that's kind of the landscape of what happens at times inside your program when you're having success and during the course of bowl season. You can see that across the country. The unique thing is you have a couple extra weeks to prepare and plan for those situations. You're not dealing with it in a seven-day span. We lost some really good players. I think that provides unique opportunity. That's the tough thing and the great thing about college football is that essentially a quarter of your roster is graduating every single year. With that provides new opportunity to go make plays because you've got more snaps on the football field. It provides opportunities in leadership. It's the great thing about college football. You're essentially building your roster and your football team every single January, and that's always true, but I think in the landscape of college football, it's certainly true, and more evident and more prevalent now with the transfer portal, too. Q. We saw Sheridan Jones not practicing yesterday. Just wondering if he was going to play in the Orange Bowl and if his career is done at Clemson. DABO SWINNEY: I'm not sure. Sheridan could come back. He's been dealing with a hip flexor, so it's going to be close. He's one of those guys that's played a lot. He's got a lot of experience, but been battling a little bit. We'll see. But as far as is he done at Clemson, he's declared this as his senior year all year, but as you know, a lot of these guys have -- I guess we're going to deal with it for a couple more years, I guess, with the COVID year. I don't know if it's his last time. A lot of guys are going to decide that after the game. Q. For both coaches, both of you were in a situation with one loss at the end of the year, you probably more likely would have been in the playoffs. In that situation, some teams find it hard to be motivated to be in this game because of the disappointment. How long did it take for you guys to get over that disappointment, and what were you able to do to keep them motivated and make sure that this game was important to them? JOSH HEUPEL: Yeah, we had to reset the following week, and I think you guys played the week after, as well. The only reason we've gotten to this point, these players didn't come into this and just inherit it. They've worked for it from the moment that we got there on campus. That's the competitive nature. It's their connection to one another. Our players were able to reset. Was there disappointment? Absolutely, in that moment, and you could feel it in the building when they came in the following day, on Monday. But they were able to reset. This is an important game to our football team. We talk about finishing. We talk about legacy. This group that is graduating and heading on, this is a way to finish it and leave a strong legacy at Tennessee. At the same time, I think bowl games in this era are also about kicking off the following season. For all those things, our kids' focus and energy out at practice has been fantastic. I think it's important that you enjoy the bowl experience while you're here in South Florida, but when you're in meetings and on the practice field, you've got to be dialed in and locked in. I really like how our guys have handled the week up until this point. DABO SWINNEY: Well, I mean, we've got to manage the disappointment. There's certainly disappointment anytime you lose a game. We all go into the season wanting to win every game. I think there's two teams that are undefeated right now. To have a great season, you have to manage success. You've got to manage failure along the way. Yeah, when you look back at the end, like man, there's only four teams right now that get to go to the playoff, as you alluded to there. So disappointing in the moment, but for us, yeah, you go back to work. Yeah, it hurts, but you come in on Sunday and you don't have time to linger. We've got a championship game the very next week to play a really good North Carolina team. So we reset, refocus, and thankfully we had another game to play. That certainly helps. Then as far as being motivated, both these teams have won 11 games. You don't go 11-2 if you're a team that doesn't have good leadership because it's hard to win. It's really hard to win. So to win 11 games in today's world in college football is special. It's a great season. Then to be able to come to the Orange Bowl and play the sixth-ranked team in the country, you turn on the tape, you get motivated real quick because these guys are competitors. Both teams, you've got guys that like to play. That's why they play football. They don't play football to whatever -- they like to play the game. It's a chance to go play the game, and not only that you get to do it at a venue like this, at Hard Rock Stadium, and you're playing one of the best teams in the country. Turn the tape on and watch these dudes run, you'll get motivated real quick. Q. Coach Swinney, the NCAA rule change allows those enrollees to get out on the field with you. What have you seen out of those guys? I was having fun watching Nick Eason with his guys trying to coach them up. How has it helped them prepare for what the season will bring? DABO SWINNEY: Yeah, it's been great. It would be even better if they would let them play. That would be great. It's been fun having those guys. I think it speeds up their acclimatization process, just getting the feel of guys. Most of the time when they get here in January they're into school and off-season program and drills and spring ball. To be able to have a visual even though it's not a normal game week, to just kind of be exposed to that a little bit, to be around some of the guys that aren't going to be here when they get going I think is a unique opportunity, as well. I think it's been great. I'm glad they did that. Then to be able to also put our eyes on them as far as having a first opportunity to really coach them in meetings, and then part of what we have always done in bowl prep is we get a lot of work on Clemson fundamentals, technique, kind of back to some basics. We get a lot of work on the opponent, and then we do a lot of JV work. We kind of create a JV season, create a couple scrimmages and have a lot of fun with the young guys, a lot of individual, a lot of that, so those guys, they couldn't scrimmage, because they couldn't get to that point, but to be able to get to work with them in individual drills and technique and coach them is very beneficial for them and us and I think just, again, it's been really fun. There were five of them that got the opportunity to come, and I think they've really enjoyed it. They're what we thought they were off the hoof. |
