3/23/2002 - Football
Paul Johnson Spring Press Conference Transcript
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Scott Strasemeier, Sports Information Director: I would like to thank everyone for coming today. A couple of quick announcements before we get started. There is a schedule of practices on page 2 of the prospectus. The media as fans are invited to attend practice. If a member of the media is planning on attending practice, we would appreciate a call first so we can meet you out at the field.
The Navy Spring Festival will be Saturday, April 20 at the stadium. Festivities will get underway at 12 noon when the Navy lacrosse team takes on number one ranked Johns Hopkins. The Brigade of Midshipmen will march-on before the lacrosse game and there will also be a fly-by. The spring football game will follow at 2:30 p.m. and there will also be a fly-by before the football game. For ticket information you can call 1-800-US4-NAVY.
Season tickets are now on sale at the Ricketts Hall Box Office or by calling 1-800-US4-NAVY. Single game tickets, except for Notre Dame, will go on sale May 15, while single game tickets for the Notre Dame game will go on sale in the fall. You can buy Notre Dame tickets in a three-game mini plan right now.
One personnel note, Gene Reese has voluntarily resigned from the Naval Academy for personal reasons. With that I will turn it over to Coach Johnson.
Paul Johnson, Head Football Coach: Thanks Scott. I am excited to be here. It seems like just a short time ago that we were flying up here to hold a press conference to announce that I was taking the job. The time has really flown by. We are very pleased with the time we had recruiting and the class we were able to put together for the upcoming year. We are looking forward to getting out there on the field for spring practice to find out more about our returning players. Currently they have been in our offseason program, lifting and we have had some morning conditioning and 5:30 a.m. runs and I have been pleased with the enthusiasm that the returning players have exhibited during that. It has gotten better each day. They have kind of learned what we expect and what we want out of them. We are just excited to get started playing football and see exactly where we are and to find out who is going to be playing for us. I think right now going into the spring we don't know much about the players. I have had the opportunity to watch all the game tapes from last year and even some practice tapes, we have been busy as a staff installing the offense and defense and putting in progressions for spring practice and laying a plan for that. Until you actually get out there and put the gear on and start flying around it's been my history through the years that sometimes the best guys in the morning running or in the weight room aren't the best football players. We will have a chance to get out there and see what happens there. We will start the spring with everything wide open in my mind. We have some guys coming back who have played some or are maybe returning starters, but I am not sure that holds a lot of water with me. The thing we are looking for is 22 guys that have a bad case of the wants. As I told our guys, the goal for this football team is to get better every day and ideally what I would like to have is when we walk off the field that we play, no matter what happens, win, lose, no matter what the score is, the other team will say we don't play anybody that plays that hard, or is in that condition, the way Navy goes at it. With that in mind, that is what we are going to try and accomplish this spring. Get our systems installed and try to learn to play at the pace that we need to play at to have a chance to be successful. Having said that I guess I can throw the thing out if anybody has any questions or anything they want to know specifically I will try to answer.
Q. When will captains be selected and why did you want to wait until after spring ball?
Johnson: We will have a vote, the team will vote, on captains at the end of spring practice. I thought it was important this year for everybody when you start new to see who the leaders are going to be how it evolves during practice. I know myself personally, I would be looking for somebody who, I have a saying, "show me don't tell me", and I would be looking for someone who is going to show me and not tell me. I don't think you want a leader that talks a lot. You want a leader that you can go to battle with and someone you can trust and you know that he is working as hard as he can and has the best interest, the team interest, at heart. I think your better served to find that guy after you have gone through a spring practice then to vote off what you know from last year or what you know from the hall.
Q. What stood out from the game films you watched?
A. They lost them all. That stood out. I think there are some things, there are certainly some decent athletes in the football program. When I looked at the tapes I didn't necessarily try to critique the schemes or look what they were doing, I was looking at personnel and I think we have some guys that can play the game. What we have to do is maximize and get them in the best position to give them a chance and get the right people on the field and learn to play hard. I am not sure they played as hard as we need to play and sometimes you think you are playing hard and you don't know that your not and that's one of the things that we will try and work on this spring, learn to play the pace that we want to play at.
Q. Do you think the morning workouts was a start in the right direction?
A. I hope so, I hope some leadership will evolve out of it. I think what it does it gives the guys on the team what's acceptable and what's not. As we said the first day as a coaching staff, I'm not going to lower my standards, your going to have to rise up to meet mine and I'm not going to come down to meet you halfway so until you come up to what were looking for we are going to have problems. It is hard to play football in my mind without some intensity. The best football players don't always win, the best football team does and by playing hard and going out there and working, that doesn't guarantee you will win, but it gives you a chance, if you don't do that then you have little or no chance unless you are way more talented then everybody else. Quite honestly, guys were asked to do some things last year that we won't ask them to do, but they may have to do some things that might be tougher. What we will have is a system on both sides of the ball and we will continue that system and work to get better at it. We may not be as diversified, we aren't going to be in the shot gun, we won't have five wide receivers and we won't have this and that and we are probably only going to run eight or nine plays but hopefully we will run the eight or nine plays better. It has always been my contention to find your niche and get good at it. I don't care if we really surprise anybody. If they can get better defending it in one week then you can in 26 weeks of running it, then there going to beat you anyway. Give them something they can do, I think that is your job as a coach. Put them in a position where they have a chance to be successful. I had an old coach one time that told me never try to teach a pig to sing, because it frustrates you and annoys the pig. Don't ask guys to do something they can't do. If you have guys playing two gaps and you don't think they can play two gaps, then that's your fault. It's easy to come back in and turn the tape on and say you have to do this and do that, but clearly if it's not getting done it doesn't do any good. It's like I told our guys the first day, we all lose, it's not players and coaches, and everybody is together. When we win, we win, when we lose, we lose. That's the way we have to approach it.
Q. Have you made any position changes?
A. There has been a few, but not like we will after the first three or four days or practice probably. Our goal is to get the best 11 guys on the field on both sides of the ball. As we look and get into practice, I am not to quick to rush to judgement off conditioning and the weight room. I want to see somebody on the field. For instance lets say we get in the secondary and we have seven or eight guys lined up at corner and clearly the four best secondary guys are corners, it would be pretty stupid to have a guy be four and five at corner when they can be one or two at safety. If we have a defensive lineman who is second or third team on the defensive line, but he could be first team at center, it is pretty stupid not to move him over there and let him play center. We may do some of that. What we are trying to do is get the best 22 on the field.
Q. Do you have the players here right now that can run your system?
A. I think we have some players that can fit what we do. We may have to tweak some things at times, just like you would anywhere. These players here are no different than anywhere else. I'm not going to give them that out. It's not any different; they're the same. The only difference is the last place I coached if we would have brought three guys to the press conference they probably would have come in sweats or t-shirts and a pair of pants and these guys came in uniform, other than that to me that is the only difference. They are college football players and we are going to expect the same things out of them as I would expect if I were the head football coach at the University of Georgia. It's our job as a coach to give them something that they can do and there is enough stuff in our system that we will find something they can do.
Q. When you were here in '95'96, how long did it take for you to put in your system.
A. I think we got better each week as the season went along and that is what you hope. There is a lot of cliches and some old adages but I really believe you never stay the same, you get better or worse every day and what you do is you work to get better and as a coach that is what I'm looking for. Certainly you want to win the games and that will be our goals and all that, but what I want to do is to get better and to play to the best of our ability and I have always told every team that I have ever coached that if we play as good as we can play, then we will live with the results, because I think you will like them most of the time. To put a timetable on how long it will take, I don't know. I will say this for the group that was here in '95 and when I came back this time. There are a lot of similarities as far as what happened the three or four years previous, but I will say this for that group of players in '95, they committed and sold out. They were tired of it. And you're talking about having a case of the wants. From morning running to everything they approached they went at it 100 miles per hour. That's what we have to get. I look at the talent, and again we haven't gotten out on the football field, but I don't know if this team doesn't have more individual talent then the teams we had in '95 and '96. Now certainly Chris McCoy was an outstanding player and I don't even know who the quarterback is going to be this year, but all in all if you looked at the speed and the size for the whole football team, there is probably not a lot of difference except guys like Clint Bruce or Gervy Alota, they had a bad case of the wants. They weren't going to lose and they fought their tail off. That's what we have to get back too.
Q. How much of spring practice will be devoted to evaluation and how much to installation?
A. You install it right from the start and you evaluate it as you go. There is no better way to evaluate then to get them out there and play. We will go ones against ones. Nobody's going to be running around with a little red shirt that is off limits. Everybody will be fair game and we will go get it. We will see who comes out.
Q. Any more you can give us on Gene Reese?
A. Not really because of privacy issues there is not a whole lot to say about it. He had some problems and hopefully he will work them out.
Q. Is there a chance he will come back.
A. No.
