Feb. 7, 2007
“We think that we potentially have a very good football team coming back. We thought we had some legitimate holes that maybe the younger guys aren’t ready to fill yet, so we signed a number of transfers. The most important ones are the ones that are going to be starting offensive linemen and starting tight ends. We picked up three junior college linemen to compete for starting jobs. We lost two starting guards – both were seniors. We signed two junior college tight ends to try to compete for a starting spot there.”
“You’ll notice that we signed two quarterbacks. There’s going to be a third one out there that signed with baseball. That means that he won’t play for us next fall. He can practice with us, but he can’t play with us. But we signed two other quarterbacks that will compete for playing time this year. One of them, Blair Peterson, is already here so he’ll get to compete in spring practice. When Kole McKamey decided not to play our depth wasn’t real good there. I thought our coaches did a really nice job of going out and finding several quarterbacks that were still looking for a place to go and I think we got a great one. The young man from Hamilton (Brad Gruner) led his team to the state championship in Arizona and if you watch him on film he’s also got four or five other guys on that team that are getting Division I scholarships today. It had surprised me that he hadn’t already committed to somebody. I thought we got lucky on that.”
“It’s easy to say this about freshmen because the junior college guys have to prove it right away and the freshmen have a little security in having a few years to prove they can play. So it’s easier to brag about the freshmen. Overall the freshman class is the best we’ve ever recruited around here. I don’t think it’s gigantic steps better than any other one, but overall – the size, the athletic ability and the speed – if you count all of them together and they walked in here right now you’d be shocked. You’d think most of them were junior college players.
“I thought the coaches did a nice job of recruiting and I thought our success over the last few years has added to it being a little bit easier to sign some guys that you couldn’t sign in the past.”
On being able to relax after getting all the letters of intent:
“It’s not quite as bad as it used to be because of all the media outlets, and the text messaging, and the internet, and the recruiting services and the bloggers. If you have a young man that’s a little shaky that is committed to you, somehow, someway someone will let you know that he’s shaky. So going into the last day, if you’ve talked to them the night before usually you feel pretty confident the next morning if you haven’t read anything on anybody’s website or something that says the kid might not be going here. A lot of those are false rumors, but if there are rumors out there you have to check it out and it makes you a little nervous. But they all came through today and it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t as nervous as it used to be when you didn’t have all those outlets to check.”
On players in the recruiting class that have the best potential:
“I think all of them do. I think the five that we got – because we can’t really talk about the one that signed with baseball – the five local kids that we got have a huge upside to all of them. Some of the ones locally you’ve seen play a lot, but the ones that aren’t from Albuquerque you haven’t seen play very much. Obviously you’ve heard about them, but you haven’t seen them play very much. There’s some outstanding athletes in that group that someday will carry on the tradition around here.”
“We have some freshmen in our program already – that will be redshirt freshmen next year – that are New Mexico kids that will continue the tradition around here of New Mexico-born players being awfully good players.”
On Brian Urlacher’s influence on recruiting:
“It’s illegal for pro players to be involved in recruiting. We can’t ask Brian or Hank (Baskett) or anybody else to call them, we can’t ask them to write them, and in fact if they do there will be an investigation. Now, we also signed two guys from the Chicago area. We have some other Chicago area guys on our team. Because Brian’s name is so big in Chicago, they wouldn’t even know where New Mexico was if he wasn’t an All-Pro linebacker for the Chicago Bears. So obviously his name helps us get in the door and with the Chicago area kids probably helps us sign them. So without him calling or writing I think he does have an effect on the recruiting class, yes.”
On the groundbreaking of the new indoor practice facility:
“We’re supposed to break ground next Wednesday for the indoor practice field. I don’t know how long it’s going to take, it’s scheduled to be done by July third it’ll be a huge facility. People don’t think facilities make a difference but they make a huge difference.
“It’s amazing the record of the football program at the University of New Mexico how much it has changed since this building (L.F. “Tow” Diehm Facility) was built. Nobody gives it credit. Everybody wants to say, `You don’t need all that stuff.’ You need all that stuff if you’re wanting to compete with the other schools that have that stuff. We do miss four or five practices a year because of weather – mostly lightning storms and they make you leave the field when the lightning shows up.”
“But it’s a huge benefit in the off season, it’s a huge benefit to a lot of other sports that either start or end their season when the weather gets bad. So it’s an exciting thing. The possibility is very exciting.”
On Brad Gruner, the incoming QB from Chandler, Ariz.:
“Well first of all when Kole decided he wasn’t coming back we sent all the coaches out hunting for quarterbacks that we thought could help us and help this program win games. Obviously there were a lot of them that had already been committed to a lot of other schools so there weren’t many out there. I thought the coaches did an outstanding job running out there. Coach (Dave) Baldwin, our new offensive coordinator, must have had 50 tapes on his desk of quarterbacks that were possibilities. Now, probably out of 50 tapes 46 of them weren’t nearly good enough to play here. But we found two or three that we thought could play here, and we had the two or three in the last couple weekends. When you watch this kid on tape he’s almost 6’2″, he’s almost 230 pounds and he’s got a gun for an arm.”
“He got hurt as a junior that’s one of the reasons he’s probably still available. As a junior he ran option football, so he’s a pretty good player that can carry the ball himself and run with it and deal the option. When you watch him this year, he was surrounded by some outstanding players too, but he drops back and he guns the ball and he has a live arm and he’s got good direction on the ball. Obviously his personality showed a lot of true leadership. There’s no wonder why he was the quarterback of a state championship team.”
On the ranking of the recruiting class in the MWC:
“I have no idea and I don’t give a darn. You can put all the stars and all that junk behind names and you can tell me how we’re the worst in recruiting in this league because that’s what we’re told every year. There’s only one other team in this whole league (Utah) that has won more conference games than us so the heck in how we did in recruiting.”