COTTON BOWL - JAN 2ND - INTERVIEW WITH KENT AUSTIN

OLE MISS REBELS OFFENSIVE NEWS CONFERENCE
Monday, December 29, 2008

Photo by Ian Halperin/

CBAAOFFENSIVE COORDINATOR KENT AUSTINOn his offensive players: “Our players have made our jobs as coaches easy, a lot easier than it can be. They’re talented. They’re bright. They work hard. They have great character. As we say in the coaching profession, they’re low-rep guys and they get it on all levels.”On QB Jevan Snead: “He’s a guy who really came on this year. He developed exactly the way we hoped he would. He has a lot of talent. He’s a great person. He has great character. He cares about being good, and he does all the right things for all the right reasons. He’s got a great future ahead of him.”

On All-American OT Michael Oher: “Mike really bought into what we asked him to do this year. He responded to (offensive line coach) Mike Markuson by being more physical up front and leading the offensive line to perform at a higher level. We’re really pleased with what Mike has done for us this year. A lot of our success can be attributed to his play.”

On WR Mike Wallace: “He’s a big-play guy with tremendous speed. I don’t believe there’s a guy who we played against this year that he couldn’t run past. We didn’t always get him the ball like we wanted to, but as the year went on we were able to find him more often. Jevan (Snead) got more comfortable with the timing with Mike and was able to connect on some deeper throws. If we had connected more with him earlier in the season, Mike would have had a much bigger year. All of that is obviously not our quarterback’s fault. We were not clicking on all cylinders in a lot of different areas.”

On WR Dexter McCluster: “We ask Dexter to do a lot. I love Dexter because he’s the epitome of a low-rep guy. He’s one of the few players I’ve coached who can actually take something conceptually off a white board and then go do it perfectly in practice without any reps. He has what we call football intelligence. He’s a tremendous athlete with great quickness, great speed and great character. He leads by example and by the way he plays. He’s a big-time receiver and running back and, at times, a quarterback for us. We ask him to do a lot, and he rises to the challenge every time.”

On the biggest adjustment of coaching college football after spending 15 seasons in the Canadian Football League as a player, assistant coach and head coach: “The biggest difference is where the players are emotionally and psychologically in their lives. On the pro level, you’re dealing mostly with guys who are older and more mature. A lot of them have families and are married. It’s more of a business. Here you are dealing with a lot more stuff off the field. Up there, if a guy messed up off the field and continued to show that pattern, you would just go get another guy.

Here you have to understand that you’re dealing with young men’s lives when some of them are still trying to find direction.”

On whether coaching at the college level is more rewarding: “You should find areas that are rewarding in whatever you do. That should come by proxy with the job that you choose. So much of that depends on what you’re willing to invest and commit to. I do find it just as rewarding, but it’s a different kind of rewarding.”

On whether he views himself as a future college head coach: “For some reason, I’ve been asked about this a lot the past few weeks. But I didn’t come down here with an agenda. I told Houston (Nutt) that right off the bat. I was honored with the opportunity that I was given. I told him that the only thing I care about is making sure that I do what he asks me to do at any level and to do it unselfishly. I’m just a very small part of a much bigger process. There are no gurus in this business. Your success individually is directly related to the success of the collective. The coaches who get that are the better coaches, in my opinion. When I had to put a staff together, I hired guys who understood that. They didn’t care about their job title. They didn’t have an agenda. They didn’t care if their name was hanging up on the door. They cared about their players, they cared about their staff members and they cared about making a difference both on and off the football field. … That’s all that mattered to me then, and that’s all that matters to me right now. I don’t even know if I’ll be coaching five years from now. I may or may not be. I love it, but I’m in love with my family. There’s a difference.”