Nov. 28, 2017
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Rocky Long Quotes | Video | Tickets (Aztec Club/Season Ticket Holders)
SDSU Football Press Conference Quotes
November 28, 2017
SDSU Football head coach Rocky Long
On the end of the regular season:
"It's kind of strange to be here without a game, but we finished the season the right way going out with a win. It was nice for the seniors to do that and now we're just sitting around. We're not practicing because we don't know when we're going to play, we're just sitting around waiting to find out where we might play."
On what he tells his student -athletes to do on a week off:
"Go to school and catch up because some of them are a little bit behind. They are actually lifting weights and conditioning this week a couple times, but we're not practicing this week. Hopefully we'll find out either Saturday night or early Sunday where the bowl is going to be because then we can set the schedule for practice."
On what he does on the week off:
"I sit around being bored. All of our coaches are out on the road recruiting. I can only go see a kid once off campus as the head coach so we save that for later in the recruiting process. All of our assistant coaches are on the road recruiting right now to make sure all the kids that are committed stay committed and trying to get others that we still need."
On his thoughts about their bowl game:
"Your guess is as good as mine. I've heard anywhere from Florida to California to New Mexico to Texas. There are a couple leagues that won't be able to fill their spots and there are a couple leagues that need more spots. Our league needs one spot for one of our teams, we have five bowl tie-ins and six teams that have qualified. I've only been asked twice by our athletic director and our commissioner who we want to play and where we want to play, like I really have some say so about it, which I don't. But I told them all we want to do is play the very best team we can play. The highest ranked team we can play, the one with the biggest name, whoever is out there that gives us a chance to improve our status."
On if he is interested in location and prestige of the bowl game:
"I'm only interested in the opponent. I'd actually like it later, the first bowl games are on (Dec. 16) which makes it a little bit difficult with finals and time to get ready for the bowl game. One of the big benefits of a bowl game is you get to practice and not only do you get ready for the bowl game, you try to develop the younger guys in your program. So if you play early in the bowl season, you don't have the opportunity to do that, all you do is get ready for the game. So if it were around (Dec. 20) to (Dec. 24) that would be perfect because now we have a few days where we can practice and develop the team and we're done before Christmas. I don't want much, I just want a couple little things that work in our advantage."
On his ideal 16-team playoff idea:
"I don't have any idea of how things work behind the scenes, but the arguments I hear about why you cannot have a sixteen team playoff don't make any sense to me whatsoever because they do it in almost every other division and every other sport as well as football, they do it in high school, they do it in the NFL. If you has a sixteen team tournament, every division one conference could get their conference champion into the tournament. Beyond that, every highly seeded team could get into the tournament too and obviously they would seed the tournament so that the Alabama's of the world would be playing the sixteenth seed. But like this year Alabama might not get in [to the four team CFP] but they would for sure get in to this plus the champion of our conference would get in and everybody knows my stance on the Power 5 having huge advantages over the non-Power 5. But every once in a great while, one of the non-Power 5 conference schools is going to be good enough to win it all. Right now, no non-Power 5 school has a chance to compete for the national championship no matter how good their record is. In NCAA basketball they do, every conference champion gets a chance, and every once in a while one of those Cinderella teams is good enough to win it all. The same thing could happen in football."