Heroes’ Day: — New Mexico Lobos vs. Boise State
Seats For Solders: $10 tickets in the turquoise section for active or retired military and all first responders. Tickets are $10 each. To purchase ticket donations, please contact Joe Gehling at 505-925-1620/jgehling@unm.edu or Andrew Aho at 505-925-5743/aaho@unm.edu
Other game activities/promotions
- Special Military themed performance from the UNM Spirit Marching Band
- The Howl Zone will feature Military & First Responder vehicles for fans to explore
- Scout Day, over 350 scouts are expected to be in attendance
- Special Hall of Honor recognitions at halftime
- $2 hot dogs for all fans in attendance
TRANSCRIPT FROM BOB DAVIE’S WEEKLY MEDIA LUNCHEON — 11-4-14
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Lobo head football coach Bob Davie held his weekly press conference on Tuesday in the U.S Bank Zia Level of the football press facility as a part of UNM’s weekly fall sports media luncheon. Here is what the head coach had to say about this week’s game with Boise State on Saturday 5:04 p.m. Mountain Time at Branch Field at University Stadium on CBS Sports Network.
Bob Davie: On to Boise State, it’s really impressive just looking through getting ready for Boise State. I think I read this right. Since, 2000 which is 14 years, (they have) the winningest percentage in college football. Period. Boise State. Since 2000, (they are) the highest scoring offense in college football. That’s amazing when you think about that kind of stability, continuity, consistency they’ve had. It’s an impressive thing to look at. Obviously this year they are number one in the Mountain West Conference in total offense and they are number one in scoring. I think they are 16th in total offense. Maybe all of us watched them against Ole Miss that first game back in Atlanta and you know they didn’t look as impressive. And then you put into perspective, and give the dust a chance to settle and you see what Ole Miss is, potentially the No. 1 team in the country there. They’ve had a couple of injuries and things happen since and then the Air Force game. I had a chance to watch some of the Air Force game live. I think we had an open date that weekend but I saw some of it. They lost that game but when you go back and look close you know they had four turnovers in the first quarter, Boise I’m talking about. They had seven turnovers for the game, something that never happens. I mean that’s a freakish thing, and give Air Force credit. I watched that tape again this morning and Air Force made some plays. They just didn’t throw the ball to Air Force. Air Force made some plays. But the point is we all know what the challenge is. They come off a game, an open date, I think they had 680 yards on Brigham Young. They had 660 yards on Nevada two weeks before that. Fresno hung in there with him but they beat them 37-27. They’re on a roll. They’re on a roll.
They look to me a lot like you pictured the past years of Boise State. The offense is clicking the quarterback’s really hot, really playing well. They have their deceptive plays. They look like they are really hitting their stride right now, that they are playing their best football of the year as it goes on, and if that wasn’t enough I made sure they had an open date before they came in. I don’t want them to have any excuses coming in here. I wanted to make sure that we get their best shot (media in attendance laughs). You know, we are 1-0 in November and they are 0-0 in November. I’d rather be coming off playing a game and winning a game then having an open date and let’s go see what happens. Let’s go see what happens and play. So that’s where we are.
Rick Wright, Albuquerque, Journal: I’m kind of under the impression that Petersen had changed some things offensively the past couple of years and that Harsin has taken it back to when he was an assistant three years ago, is that kind of the case?
Bob Davie: I think that’s somewhat accurate. Last year they really became a no-huddle, spread zone read kind of team that is a lot like everybody. Pretty much the things you see week to week now in college football at some level. He has gone back to a little more of a multiple personnel, more tight ends in the game, I think more of the deceptive play piece of it. Maybe a little more of the jet sweep kind of things that you associated with the older Boise. They still kept the component of that zone-read because the quarterback is really fast. He is fast so they’ve kept that. It’s a little more of the Boise we’ve played a couple of years ago here, and what we played in Texas to a degree when Bryan Harsin was the offensive coordinator at Texas (UNM played Texas in Coach Davie’s first year – Ed.). So yeah they are a little different than they were last year. I think they’re much better than they were a year ago on offense. Not that we didn’t have our hands full obviously, they scored 45 points on us. They just seem to be that different style that’s a little bit different than other people.
Van Tate, KRQE: Coach you’ve talked before about how beneficial it has been for Lamar to watch before going in. How much will that help him now as he makes his first start?
Bob Davie: It’s been beneficial for Lamar to watch. That’s part of the reason we would start Cole. With that said I noticed Saturday the longer he was in there the more aggressive he became. He was a little tentative at first I thought, and as the game went on he became more aggressive. Maybe starting him he can get off to a hotter start and get playing more aggressive early. I don’t know. We don’t really have that choice so let’s go see what he can do. I think this home stretch of the season for us and for Lamar Jordan is really important. Just to see where we are, see what we truly have. It’s a pretty good test these next four weeks, you guys all know what the schedule is
Marty Watts, 101.7 The Team: Coach I watched the Air Force tape the other night, and Air Force took advantage of the turnovers but the thing I noticed was the play action. They were able to have open guys on play action with their running attack. Boise State bought into it. Are you going to plan on more play action?
Bob Davie: I think, totally candid, Air Force throws the ball better than we do. I’ve watched a lot of Air Force. I stood there in pregame and watched Air Force in person. They actually throw the ball better than we do and we are working towards that. Obviously that has to be a piece of our offense moving forward to go from being competitive to being able to win, so we are building to do that. We are not quite good enough yet and the confidence level isn’t there quite yet to really call it and to go do it with the game on the line when it really matters. You saw us the last drive of the game up there. It was a thing of beauty. It was an unbelievable drive to go (66) yards with no threat of the pass into the wind to execute at the level we executed with anybody anywhere knowing we weren’t going to throw the ball. With that said we all know we have to be able to throw the ball and get more explosives. Is it this week? I don’t know how realistic that is that we can make that kind of improvement but hopefully through the next month of this season we’ll know a lot more about “do we have the quarterback that can do that?” moving forward in this program. I think we do, but we will know more. That is what this is. We have to take the next step in this program and that mirrors what we have to do on offense as well.
JP Murrieta, KOB: Along those lines coach, from a coaching perspective generally speaking when is the best time to pass if you have the elements you want because you don’t want to be stuck on a third and long when everyone knows it’s coming.
Bob Davie: JP that’s the real dilemma. When you aren’t really efficient, there’s no margin for error like on 1st-and-10 to throw an incompletion. I mean it’s a beautiful thing to throw on 1st-and-10 with our offense. Everybody knows that. But all of a sudden it’s an errant throw and it’s 2nd-and-10 and that goes back forever in coaching. So it is across the board everybody. There are some real issues there that we are a run, run-based offense. There are some real legitimate issues there with personnel. There’s a lot of legitimate issues but now we have to move past all of those. We’ve been here long enough. We’ve had a chance to recruit quarterbacks. We have to move past that now, and that’s the next step. I guess to answer your question with us the perfect opportunity is on running downs to throw the play action, that’s one piece of it. But then there’s another piece of it of throwing when you’re behind in the game and also throwing when its 3rd-and-10 or when its 3rd-and-12. We ran the trap up in there on 4th-and-9 at Air Force the other day. We threw on third down then we came back and ran the trap on 4th-and-9, almost cracked it. But you’re not going to make a living doing that. You have to be able to have success to call it. You’re not very smart to call something deep down you’re not sure is going to work and that’s where we are.
Orlando Sanchez, KOAT: Coach how rare is it to win a game throwing for five yards? Is that something that can happen again and be successful?
Bob Davie: Well, put it this way … I’m smart enough and you guys are all smart enough … if you lose a game and only throw for five yards it’s not good. But we won so you live another week with those kind of statistics. But there’s a bigger, bigger picture to this entire piece. You guys have been in Albuquerque, New Mexico a long time. You’ve seen a lot of this football program and what it has been and what it was when we came here. There’s an element of gaining credibility in being competitive first. We’ve been able to do that and we’ve done some incredible things here. Trust me. On the broader scope of things now, can you win throwing for five yards and completing two passes? Absolutley not. We all know that. It’s one step at a time in building this program. It takes a lot of courage. It takes a lot of resiliency. It takes a lot of things. This isn’t for everybody.
There was a period late in the game where I’m thinking and I actually said to Bob DeBesee, “we have not completed a pass today, have we?” When you think about it, it was like did we complete a pass today? So obviously that’s the next area that we have to improve. At least we are known for something, we have an identity. At least there’s something we can do to go be close in a football game. It was 3-33, being outscored by 32 points a game over those 36 games. Again, be competitive. I don’t like doing it. I’m doing things I don’t necessarily want to do, but we’re doing what we have to do to build a program to have enough credibility and enough competitiveness to go recruit some guys, so you’re not getting beat by 32 points a game over a three-year period. It’s simply what it is, right?
Henry Tafoya: Coach literally what does a win do for you? I don’t want to sound rhetorical but do you see it in their eyes? Their poise? Their work ethic? Can you measure literally what it does for a team?
Bob Davie: Yeah, I think you can. I think my sole message after the game was, and you guys may have heard this, just compare this to what it was in Colorado Springs. Just take a minute right here and picture here in this little locker room, you’re about to go out there get on those buses, you’re going to go out there and all that time it takes to get through security to get on a plane and you’re going to fly back to Albuquerque. Just take a moment and think what this next couple of hours are like compared to what it was in Colorado Springs, and that’s what it is. It’s such a huge difference winning and losing. It’s obvious. I think it’s big and I think you can judge it just by what your life is. It affects everyone. It affects your wife. It affects everyone around you. It affects everything you do cause this is all you do, so yeah, it’s huge to win.
Scott Stiegler, KKOB: Coach can you talk about the play that Isaiah made? He didn’t even … he just told me a little while ago he didn’t even expect to play, didn’t want to play because of the hamstring, and then he goes in and make the game-changing play.
Bob Davie: We’ve got some really good players not playing for us. Really good players. Isaiah Brown, Daniel Henry, guys we are redshirting, Johnny Vizciano, Crusoe Gongbay. There’s a lot of good players that a program, as young as we are, has a difficult time overcoming. But Isaiah, who I think is really going to be a good player here … very competitive, wanted to go in the game because he knew momentum (was going their way). He said, “Coach, I have to go in. I have to go make a play.” The amazing thing is he went in and he did make a play, and you saw him hobble down the sidelines. He’s hurt, he’s hurt again. I appreciated it. I talked to our team about that. Here’s a guy who hobbles off the sideline puts it on his back to say I need to go make a play, and he made a play. Now the ball was thrown a little bit behind and all that but he made a play. He hobbled down that sideline. That’s pretty impressive. I think he’s another one of these young players who we are talking about that gives us a chance.
Van Tate: Coach since Lamar has had some success throwing the ball in high school and stuff like that do you think you guys are closer to where you might want to be, with him, having that passing attack.
Bob Davie: Lamar Jordan … was recruited by Arkansas as an athlete, he wasn’t going to be a quarterback at Arkansas. We probably were the only school that recruited him with a legitimate chance to be quarterback and was going to give him the opportunity. That’s why he is here. He’ll be the first one to tell you it wasn’t his passing ability in high school to cause him to win all those games. He throws it good enough. He really does, and I think he’s improving as a passer. That’s just one element. It’s receivers, it’s offensive line, it’s a huge piece of how much time that we invest in doing it. Let’s be fair to our players and be fair to Lamar Jordan. We don’t spend as much time as most teams. We’ve probably spent as much time as Air Force. But Air Force has been doing the same thing with the same coaching staff for a long time now. There’s a lot invested in the bank. They have years of doing that stuff. So there are a lot of issues. There are a lot of things. On defense there were times in that game where we were close to being dominant. Early in that game we were good. I’m thinking it’s going to be a 7-point, maybe 10-point UTSA kind of game … we were good. Then all of a sudden, we lose a little confidence, we get a little rattled, the tempo picks up. The reality is we don’t run no huddle on offense so there’s a little inherent problem on defense for us of when it really starts going fast, and you combine that with young players, we start to collapse a little bit. That’s just some inherent things in the program that we have to solve a little bit. We all know what the issues are. We just have to solve it. It’s not just Lamar. Lamar throws it good enough. It’s the totality of all those things, but if we would of come in here and try to be balanced and try to do this and that … I’m not sure we could make it 15 plays and 66 yards and use up seven minutes and win a game.
In fact I know we couldn’t. So all of a sudden you try to be this and you try to be that and you try to that and you got nothing, and all of a sudden a new coach is coming in trying to do what he is trying to do. No. I’m going to try and find something we can do and we are going to have an identity and then we will build on that identity, and that’s all we are trying to do. Frank told me on the way over first-year players playing their first game in Division I football. What’s our number?
Frank Mercogliano, Asst. A.D. for Communication: Forty percent of all players this year have played for the first time in FBS.
Bob Davie: Yeah, 40% of our players have stepped on a Division I football field for the first time, and the numbers were 30 out of 75 have never stepped on a Division I football field before. I look at Boise’s two-deep and 18 of their 22 offensive players have been redshirted. They have a fifth-year senior quarterback. They have a fourth-year junior tailback that’s outstanding. Their punter, their kicker are redshirted guys. That redshirt is what we are all working towards. Where you look for RS, RS, RS, RS, next to all those guys. Unless that kid was just a great player that came in as a freshman and you had to play him because he was so dynamic. Not I played him as a freshman because I had no one else to play. No, the only way you play is because you’re that good that you could go beat somebody out. Not you have to play. We are getting a little closer towards the redshirt piece of it.
Scott Stiegler: Coach what’s your third-string quarterback option for this game?
Bob Davie: It’s Jujuan Lawson the freshman. He’s pretty good. Obviously we don’t want to play him. We are trying to redshirt him. I’d hate to have to play him but if we do, we do and he’ll understand.
Fred Hultberg, 101.7 The Team: Coach Pressley is currently playing out of his mind, he’s playing so well. I noticed in the game he came out, he was laying down on his back, and then all I heard is they gave him an inhaler. I didn’t know if he had gotten hurt or whether that was all he needed.
Bob Davie: He had a little respiratory problems early in the game. He made some unbelievable runs, and then you saw a little bit of the bad Pressley to though, at the end. When you can’t have a negative yardage play and he tried to make the magic happen a couple times late in the game. But when it’s good, it’s really good. He’s a talented guy and I think you guys see what I meant when I said he’s unorthodox. Sometimes you’re not sure where he is going to go and some of that comes back to haunt us but certainly some of it has helped us to, because he’s done some things flat on his own if we are honest.
Fred Hultberg: At the end of the game I don’t know if you went to find Isaiah Brown or not but you were hugging the heck out of him on TV. Did you go looking for him?
Bob Davie: I was just trying to find somebody to hug (laughter). It’s been a long time. It’s been a drought.
Rick Wright: In terms of tempo Bob, where would you put Boise State? Are they New Mexico State/Fresno State?
Bob Davie: No, they can do it and they do it some, but they’re more of a change personnel team. They’ll go from one tight end, three wide receivers to two tight ends two receivers and anytime they change personnel then you have the chance to exchange personnel with them and you can slow the tempo down. It’s only when teams stay with the same personnel on the field that you can go rapid fire, and you just have to get lined up as fast as they do.
Robert Portnoy, Voice of the Lobos: How about the execution on the 4th-and-2 play with two redshirt freshmen. I was thinking back to when Lamar made the bad read on a previous fourth down earlier in the season and how great that was.
Bob Davie: That’s a great point. We had a chance at UTEP where we had a play late in the game against UTEP, we are probably going to win that football game if we get it pitched. Cole went down early and it’s (Clayton) in there. We didn’t get it pitched late in the game or else we are talking about being 4-4 right now. For Lamar Jordan to pitch the ball to Romell Jordan on 4th-and-2, going into the wind in that situation, it’s pretty good. Romell Jordan made another run on 3rd-and-2, converted a first down and was really a tough run. Teriyon Gipson is a true sophomore. One of those guys you wish you wouldn’t have played or didn’t have to play last year. He should be a redshirt freshman. Toye Adewon is a guy, a redshirt freshman offensive guard number 59. He played about close to 40 snaps and is really coming on. He’s a guy that we’ve been waiting on, a 320 pound offensive guard, went to the Naval Academy. He’s a redshirt freshman for us. He’s coming along and he is going to be really big for our future here.
Scott Stiegler: Coach one last question about Boise State. They’ve been kind sort of the gold standard of those programs that are sort of below the top-echelon, and I get people that ask all the time, why can’t that happen here, or in Fort Collins, or wherever. What are your thoughts?
Bob Davie: Being totally honest, Boise State was really good when they were in I-AA. They had a tremendous tradition of I-AA football and they were putting a lot of people in those stands for a long time at Boise State. We are coming from a non-tradition and not a lot of people in the stands. Colorado State’s had a bit of a tradition, I mean when Sonny Lubick was there they won a lot of games, a lot of games when Sonny Lubick was there. You know they were past the 6-6, 7-5 … they won a lot of games, but Boise State was a tradition-rich I-AA, Georgia Southern-type program that now you see making the move. They are in a great city, they’ve done a lot of things facility-wise but they’ve been winning games and putting people in the stands for a long time at Boise State. They were never in a drought as far as winning. They’re just late getting to the party on the I-A level, and they’ve seized the opportunities too. They have done some magical things, the deceptive plays, the Oklahoma Fiesta Bowl, they’ve done a great job, and they’ve kept continuity. Bryan Harsin played there. Mike Sanford their offensive coordinator played there. Chris Peterson was there a long time. They’ve built it up, they’ve built it up. Thanks guys.
Transcribed by Jessica Montoya and Frank Mercogliano. The written transcript is edited for AP writing style and content.