By Daniel Rigdon / Sports Writer
The Meridian Star
HOOVER, Ala. —
In his first year as Auburn's head coach, Gene Chizik enjoyed quite a successful season, ending the year with eight wins that was capped off by a 38-35 overtime victory against Northwestern in the Outback Bowl. However, Chizik was quick to express how the one year success was nice but not exactly what the Auburn program is aiming for. Instead, Chizik has the Tigers on a long-term plan and is looking to build the program after laying the foundation last year.
"Probably the most important thing that we felt like needed to happen last year was for us to build a foundation for what we're trying to do down the road," said Chizik. "This is a long-term plan. This is a long-term vision. We feel extremely, extremely excited on the fact that we feel like we have the football team based on last year going in the right direction. That doesn't mean we've arrived, and we know that."
That being said, Auburn, with its explosive big-play offense, is looked at as an up-and-comer in the SEC West along with Arkansas. However, with the big plays comes the consequence of scoring too quickly and giving the opponent back the football with a lot of time. Chizik addressed that in detail.
Said Chizik: "What do you need to do from an offensive standpoint? One of them is have explosive plays. When you have that — in our case last year, it was a little bit of a different dynamic, simply because we had plays where we scored fast and quick. We're good with that. I'm good with that. That's not a problem.
"But with that offense, there are big-play and big-strike capabilities. What we need to address that we saw in the offseason as we evaluated everything is, How can we sustain longer drives? That was where we felt like, from a team concept, we needed to, you know, continue to improve. So that means getting first downs. That means driving the football, running the football, doing the things that can keep our defense off the field a little bit more."
All in all, Chizik believes that his team needs to concentrate on adding to the foundation it laid last season and continue to be consistent in moving forward.
"All things being told, consistency is going to be the name of the game with us in terms of us being better and really laying the second brick in the foundation of what we're trying to do," noted Chizik. "Again, you know, wins and losses is not really something that we can pin a number to, to say this is going to be a successful second year, because I know some of you are going to ask that. It's more of, we want to be a more consistent team and we want to, on a consistent basis, play better than we did last year, then the numbers work themselves out."
Dooley ready to change things in Knoxville
First-year head coach Derek Dooley made it clear he wants to do more than just win ballgames at Tennessee. Dooley wants to impact his players lives in a positive way and change the culture of Tennessee football. He especially wants to move to implement this quickly in lieu of a bar fight involving Tennesse players that resulted in an off-duty Knoxville police officer being knocked unconcious.
"I spent several hours talking to everybody who was at the site, try to gather as much information as I could. I felt like it was important to make some swift decisions based on the information that I had," said Dooley. "It's important to do a lot of things internally to try to minimize the risk of those incidents. It starts with the head coach laying an expectation of how we're going to represent the institution. But as we all know, that's only a starting point. I think from there, there's a tremendous educational component that goes with it, of teaching young people right, wrong, how to act, good choices, consequences of choices.
"Now, we have begun a new structure. We call it the VFL. Everybody wants to play in the NFL, but we want to be a 'Vol For Life.' We want to turn professional as men. And the program is centered around several components: character education is one of them, there's a life skills component, there's a community service component, spiritual growth component, career development component. And I think over the course of two, three, four years, you'll really see tremendous change in how we're going to help our young people."
Although the Volunteers are full of youth and inexperience, Dooley believes they will be able to compete and is interested to see how hard his team will play for 60 minutes in each of the 12 games in the upcoming season.
Miles hopes adjustments equal a championship, recognizes tough schedule
After coming off a tough two-point loss to Penn State in the Capital One Bowl, Les Miles realized that he needed to make some adjustments so that he could put his team in contention to win another championship. That is just what he did.
"After last season, we looked at those things that we need to do to put this team in a position to win a championship," said Miles. "We looked at everything we did. We hired three coaches. Our weight/strength position, you know, adjusted. What we do on offense and defense we adjusted. We practiced a little differently. We've done a lot of great things.
"Certainly we kept some those. Some things we needed to fix and put in a right perspective. We're working towards making real quality adjustments so that our team can focus on those things that will lead it to the championship."
The other concern Miles wanted to address was the physicality of the running game that LSU has long been known for. The coach also felt like his team needed to gain strength and speed on the defensive side of the ball.
"We're more physical," added Miles. "We can run the football better. I can tell you that we're stronger. I can tell you that our defense is faster and quicker to the ball. We tested our team after spring and found that they were bigger and stronger than they were before last fall. And that the summer, they've had a great summer. All accounts, they've worked extremely hard, they've been in the heat. I was passing by the runningback's room the other day, and I heard some commotion. I opened the door. My veteran, Stevan Ridley, Richard Murphy, were teaching the freshmen what to do."
