goldandblue
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via College Football: Rivals.com - College Football public content.
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Lou Holtz met with the media on Thursday evening before receiving the 2008 Moose Krause Distinguished Service Award. Here are a few highlights from his question-and-answer session.
Question: Lou, Charlie's handing over the play calling duties this year. As a coach, how's that work?
Holtz: I did that once or twice, I'd never do it again. I know what I want to do and how I want to do it. I'm going to catch the static. I want to be the guy to throw the ball. The nice thing though is when you don't call the plays and they holler at me all the time for not throwing it to the tight end, I say, 'I told the offensive coordinator to throw it to the tight end! He won't throw it to the tight end, don't blame me.'
That was me personally. I felt I could control the game and control the defense as well by calling plays whether we're going to get in a shootout or whether we're going to play it conservatively depended on how you're playing defensively. Do you take chances or just say we're better than them in the long run? I just felt that. Plus I always felt I had a good feeling for making calls during the game. And Charlie's called them an awful lot.
I wish I could have been upstairs and calling them. All you see on the sidelines is two ends coming together and you say, 'What happened?'
Coaching is a lot different now. You have a lot more chairmen of the boards. They hire an offensive coordinator and a defensive coordinator. They just orchestrate everything. Everyone has to be themselves. All I'm saying is in talking to myself I'm the type of guy that's sort of a control freak, I guess. That's what my wife claims at least.
Question: Charlie's said, 'I'm making a lot of changes in how I'm doing things.' Were you constantly doing that? Were you ever at a crossroads where you made a big change in how you approach things?
Holtz: I think we should embrace change as long as we're changing for the right reason.
I felt as a coach I had two purposes: graduate athletes and win. Whatever change we had to make to do that, we did. I used to be a true veer option coach, it's still the greatest offense going. But, we couldn't recruit the great tailback, we couldn't recruit the great quarterback, so we had to change.
As you know, I don't like to throw the ball. I won't even have a passing gear in my car when I was here at Notre Dame because it's not hard to take the ball and hand it to Ricky Watters or Jerome Bettis. I can do it, he can do it, she can do it, anybody can do it. It's not hard.
I go to South Carolina and we're going to run the ball. We take the ball and Jerome Bettis and Ricky Watters isn't there. The guy that is there doesn't want the ball! And we go 0-11. All of a sudden we had to change. We spread people out all over. Did I want to change? No. But we couldn't win doing it the other way.
One of the mistakes I made is when you are successful, you don't want to change. You want to keep doing what you've always been doing. Sometimes I look back and say we should have been ahead of the curve a little bit more as far as changing. But don't change for the sake of changing.
Question: Talk about this upcoming season.
Holtz: I think they're going to have an excellent year this year, I really and truly do. I think the changes that they've made on the coaching staff have been positive. I have great respect for (Jon) Tenuta coming from Georgia Tech. I think moving Corwin Brown to the defensive secondary ... all great football teams have a great defense and all great defenses start with a great secondary. I think they're going to be excellent in that area.
I think the schedule is very, very favorable. This is one of those years where they could possibly play one Top 25 team. Now, you don't know when the season begins who's good and who's bad. But you go based on last year and what everybody lost. I think Charlie is a winner and a competitor and I think that those people will bounce back after last year. I think they started coming on at the end of the year, won their last three games I think it was. With everybody coming back, I think it will be a very good year.
Question: Did you have a chance to talk to coach Weis after the season?
Holtz: Yeah, I've talked to him a couple times. There are about six or seven coaches around the country that call me. I do the same thing for them that Ara Parseghian did for me. I'll give you my opinion, I will not give you my advice. Advice is what you should do, an opinion is this is what I believe and here's why I believe it, because when I tried to do it this way, I had a bad result and this is why I had a bad result.
Yeah, I've talked to Charlie. He knows what he's doing. He's got all kinds of contacts in the field of coaching. You work for (Bill) Parcells, you work for (Bill) Belichick, he's got contacts. He's smart, he understands Notre Dame, he's been a student here. He's obviously an excellent recruiter. He's a hard worker. I have no qualms about the future about Notre Dame football, none whatsoever.
If I can get a restraining order against Mark May, it should be a very good fall.
Question: Did you ever foresee Mike Haywood getting into coaching?
Holtz: Mike was a very talented individual. He was a senior in '86 and did not play most of the year. You don't know what an individual is going to do. We had presidents of banks or presidents of companies and you go, 'Wow, that guy couldn't remember right or left.' You always get surprised by it.
Any time somebody comes out of Notre Dame, they're really qualified to really be successful in their life. People don't come to Notre Dame to be a coach. I remember when I'm in my office and Skip came in and said, 'I want to be a coach.' I said, 'We didn't send you to Notre Dame to be a coach, we sent you to Notre Dame to be president of a corporation. I could have sent you to Kent State to be a coach.'
Question: Charlie talked the other day about how all successful teams are player-run. Can you talk about some of your experiences where the players took control and let you do more X's and O's?
Holtz: He and I would probably word it in different ways.
Father Hesburgh said this to me and I'll never forget this, 'I can name you the head coach at Notre Dame, I can give you the title because titles come from above. What I can't do, I can't name you the leader.' If you're going to be a leader, you'd better have a vision for where you want to go and plan for how you want to get there. You'd better lead by example and you'd better hold people accountable and you'd better make sure they all share the same core values. Core values are what hold a country together, hold a team together, hold a family together. These are things where we believe we're not going to comprise, I don't care what you are. The leadership will do it.
I had certain guys I'd look at. How hard were we working in practice? I'd look at a Chris Zorich, I'd look at a Jeff Burris. I didn't look at the guy that was always bitching and moaning and he never broke a sweat. If Zorich and Burris and those people were dragging, then you know you're working them too hard.
I'll never forget, we were in spring practice, the players came to me and said, 'We want to have a team meeting without the coaches'. Why's that? What do you need? They have a team meeting, I'm in my office and I expect them to tell me. So I said the next day, 'How'd it go?' 'Oh, it went fine.' About four days later they wanted another team meeting. Why? 'Well, we just need one.' So we had it and nobody came again. The third time about four days later they wanted another team meeting. I said I wanted to know why. I think I'm having a mutiny because it's spring practice and I'm not a very popular guy in the fall let alone the spring.
They said Lake Dawson, who was from the state of Washington and he was not in school in the spring. The first meeting was to tell the team they'd like to contribute money to bring Lake Dawson back for the spring game. This was the spring of '92. The second meeting was to tell the team that the NCAA had approved it. The third meeting and the last one was to tell the team they had raised the money and Lake Dawson would be coming back. To me, that's when you know you have something special and '93 was a special team.
Why? Their attitude wasn't, 'Hey, here I am. Look at me.' It was 'What can I do for my teammates?' When you talk about running the team, if there's problems, if there's people that aren't doing the right thing, the players are going to be able to say 'Hey, we don't do that here.'
Every freshman that came in was assigned a big brother. The first thing I told the freshmen was, 'You will become us, we will not become you.' I don't care how you did things in high school, you'll come here to become us. You come to Notre Dame to become us.
I had very few athletes leave Notre Dame at the end of their junior year. I think Rocket left and Jerome Bettis. Rocket came and said, 'When I came to Notre Dame you said I'd have a good job offer. I've been offered $18 million. If I stay another year do you think I'll get a better one?' What are you going to say? The Todd Lyghts, the Chris Zorichs, the Jim Flanigans, all the other great ones, Ricky Watters and them, I told them they had an obligation to provide leadership. You're seniors. You've got to teach younger people how to do it. We relied an awful lot on upperclassmen.
I think you're going to have a wonderful year following Notre Dame. I pull for them and cheer for them and will be following them very much so this year. I think it's going to be an exciting year. It's going to be a good year to be an Irishman.
I think it is still ok to post public content right? I did add the URL of the site above the quote. Fix if not ok.
