Clawson Presser, Not all Boring Edition

Coach Clawson had his presser to end the regular season yesterday, and I encourage any Falcon fan to hop over and listen to the whole thing.  Very compelling stuff, and considerably more open now that the season has ended.

First, he dealt with the Kevin Alvarado situation, and gave what appeared to be a pretty transparent description of what had happened.

The gist of it is this:

• Kevin has presented no discipline problems--not even 30 seconds late for a meeting.
• Kevin disclosed the incident to Coach himself.
• Initially, it was not believed the police were going to be involved, and the situation was being addressed internally at the university and within the football program.
• Once charges were brought, the scope of the issue changed and Kevin was suspended from competition, pending the outcome of the case.

He was asked directly why Alvarado played two games after the assault, and Clawson said that was appropriate with an issue that appeared would not involve the court or the police.

As I noted in my first post on this, let's not make any assumptions until the issue is resolved.

In the meantime, Coach made it clear that the conduct of players is extremely important to the program, and that it will not be tolerated or accepted.  Young men will, however, continue to make mistakes.

He got a fairly pointed question concerning the fact that Coach Brandon was fired in part for discipline issues within the program, and he was brought in to fix that, and what did he think about the Alvarado situation from that perspective.

I thought he was a little defensive here.  He said that as a coach you deal with stuff like that everyday and it is never where you want it to be, which is not defensive by its words--more by the tone he used.

On other stuff, he said he was excited with the end of the season, winning 6 out of the last 7 games, and beating Toledo.  He noted that there were a number of games where BG was tied or losing in the fourth quarter and ended up winning (the most marked change from last year's team), and that he was very pleased with the way the first season ended.

His consistent them has been that even when the team was 1-4, they still practiced like they were a good team and kept working hard, and that was eventually what brought them out of it.  He especially noted that the OU game was a very tough loss, because of the dropped TD pass and the team being close when it ended.  (He also noted that if BG delivers on that game, we're probably playing in Detroit tonight.)

Anyway, he said that the biggest part of the season's success was that the seniors bought into the change and that was how the team exceeded expectations.  The players didn't fight his changes or try to keep things they way they used to be. 

He said the seniors motivated the team before the UT game by saying that if they won, they could stay a team for another month, and if they lost, it was all over.  That's pretty good stuff, in my opinion.

For the first time in public he talked about how thin this year's team is--and to some extent will be.  When you consider redshirts, injuries, etc, he said we were often down to 45-50 scholarship players who were available to play, which is a pretty low number and less even than an NFL team dresses for a game.  Starters had to play a lot of snaps, including special teams.

Just an aside:  if Brandon had been down to 45 scholarship players, he would have been whining about it all year.

He talked about how the Freddie Barnes season evolved.  He said that in spring practice, Barnes emerged as the top WR. Then, a rash of injuries hit the remaining WRs, and that necessitated getting the ball to Barnes on a priority basis.  If our WRs were healthy, he probably would have had somewhere in the 80 catch range.

He noted disappointment that BG was 6-2 in MAC play and only had four guys honored on the All-MAC team.  He noted that Sheehan deserved second team (which I covered earlier, it is a complete joke that Hiller was ahead of Sheehan and utterly indefensible).  In particular, he thought Jarrett Sanderson deserved to be honored.

Coach was asked if he felt that with all the first year starters on defense, it took a while for them to gel during the season.  He was pretty candid about citing the true difference as the defense with Mahone and without him.  We only lost one game where Mahone played this year and he made a huge difference to the defense.

Someone said they had been contacted to buy ads for the Humanitarian Bowl, but Clawson said there has not been any decision made on that.  He said that it will either be Boise, DC, or Toronto.  (Note:  I think everyone is expecting Boise).  He doesn't care who we play.

Finally, a cautionary note to the Falcon Nation.  The next two classes are considered pretty thin talent wise.  A lot of players who were recruited in those classes are no longer with the program.  While I have confidence in this coaching staff, it is quite possible that a couple of challenging years lie ahead for the program.  If we win next year, we will probably be exceeding expectations even more than this season.  (We'll look later at this, but even though most of our defense was playing for the first time, we were a very senior-dominated defense again this season).

Coach said that you have to recruit the right guys for our program...guys who want to be here and are committed to graduating from this university.   Obviously, our program had a couple years when we didn't do a very good job of that, and the price will be paid.  It wasn't all bad--remember that the prior regime recruited Freddie Barnes, Tyler Sheehan and Jarett Sanderson.  But, we won't have optimal numbers.

Anyway, there will be a lot more opportunities to rehash the season in the coming weeks and months, once it is ACTUALLY OVER, which it, thankfully, is not.