Quick Hits: Everything Neal Brown Said at Big 12 Media Days
Opening statement
"Upset about the media poll. I definitely do not agree with that. The positive is that the media has not been as far as predicting the Big 12, has not been very successful in recent years, so I think that bodes well for us. But I'll say this in a more serious note, I was sitting on the beach last week when Mike Montoro, our sports information director for football sent me a text and I made the mistake of looking at it. And from that point on, my vacation was over."
Why he disagrees with Big 12 preseason poll
"I believe in our staff and believe in our players. And then how we finish will be the next thing. We beat Oklahoma, beat Oklahoma State on the road, winning two of our last three games. Offensively, this is going to be our best group. We have 132 starts returning on our offensive line. If that's not most in the country, it's gotta be close. Within that group we've got four former freshman All-Americans, we've got three for sure All-Conference type players. We have a budding superstar at running back in CJ Donaldson. And defensively, we're going to be one of the most improved units in the Big 12, if not in the country. We have all-league type players at each level. Sean Martin at defensive end. Lee Kpogba, who will be one of the leading tacklers in the conference this year at MIKE linebacker. And then Aubrey Burks at safety. And we've added talent and experience in the secondary through the transfer portal. Looking forward to proving everybody wrong. We won't finish there."
If tempo of offense will be slower
"I think running the football is going to be the strength of our offensive team. But one emphasis on that is we've got to be more explosive in our pass game and I think that's where we got to show some growth offensively. We ran the football at times very successfully last year. What we didn't do as good a job of is taking advantage of that run game with some explosive pass plays. As far as tempo, we want to be able to present ourselves playing fast all the time and then let the game dictate the tempo. We practice at a really fast pace. We're going to have the ability to go as fast as anybody in the country."
Reaction of the preseason poll from the players
"I think we're past in this day and age with media information of being able to ignore anything. I think your best opportunity is just to confront it. We had a team meeting on Tuesday where we talked about it in detail and probably in more colorful terms than I just did here but a lot of the same things that I said to our team, I just repeated here in front of you all. I have a strong belief. And what we spent a lot of time on is just being better. We have a clear vision of what we have to improve on. Offensively, we need to get better efficiency-wise, especially on first down and then in the red zone. We've got to be more explosive and we've got to eliminate errors. Defensively, we've got to limit the explosive plays. You're going to give up some, especially in the league that we play in. We have to limit those explosive plays and we've got to be able to create takeaways. We've been focusing on ourselves and getting ourselves better. The is something that's going to increase the size of the chip [on the shoulder]. The chip was already there, it just increases the size."
Thoughts on the secondary
"You got to be able to defend the pass. If you go back and look at us, we played really good defense for three years. In 2020, we played great defense. What we did a good job of is, we gave up some completions but we kept the ball in front of us, we were able to tackle, and we didn't give up the home run shots. We knew we needed to get some veterans, so we went out and added Montre Miller from Kent State, who started double digit games at corner, was an All-MAC player. We added Anthony Wilson, who's started over thirty games and was a three-time All-Sun Belt player at Georgia Southern. We added Beanie Bishop, who played at two previous institutions with double digit starts. So, do you have to play at a high level in the secondary to win this league? Yes. Do you have to have multiple draft picks? I'm not sure."
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