Dec. 14, 2006

AUBURN - The 10th-ranked Auburn football team began bowl preparations Thursday with a workout that lasted a little less than two hours at the practice fields behind the Athletic Complex.

The practice marked the end of a layoff that lasted nearly a month for the Tigers, who were last seen at Bryant-Denny Stadium Nov. 18 in a 22-15 win over Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Since that victory, Auburn players have taken time from formal practices for the Thanksgiving holiday and academic finals.

Thursday's workout was one of seven for the Tigers over the next week. The team will practice again Friday and Saturday before taking Sunday off. The team will reconvene Monday through Wednesday before enjoying the holiday season beginning Friday.

"It's good to get back and started," Auburn head coach Tommy Tuberville said. "We had a very spirited, enthusiastic practice today. It's good to see our guys back. It has been a long three weeks out recruiting and getting ready for the bowl game, and also these guys finishing up academically."

Auburn will face a Nebraska team in the AT&T Cotton Bowl Classic that finished the regular season 9-4 overall and 6-2 in Big 12 Conference play. The 22nd-ranked Cornhuskers last played Dec. 2 in the Big 12 Championship Game, losing to Oklahoma, 21-7. Prior to the loss, Nebraska had won three straight games.

"Nebraska is a good football team," Tuberville said. "Coach (Bill) Callahan has done a good job sticking with his philosophy. We watched some film from last year and this year. We noticed how much they have improved running the same offense that we run, with a lot of different formations. They run the ball first, and then throw it.

"There is a lot of tradition at Nebraska, a lot of national championships and a lot of bowl games. They have a very large fan base that really loves football. We are looking forward to a challenge. It will be a big challenge for us to play Nebraska."

The Tigers will meet Nebraska Jan. 1 in the 71st annual AT&T Cotton Bowl Classic. The game kicks off at 10:40 a.m. CT at Cotton Bowl Stadium and will air live on FOX.

Opening Statement ...
"It's good to get back and started. We had a very spirited, enthusiastic practice today. It's good to see our guys back. It has been a long three weeks out recruiting and getting ready for the bowl game, and also these guys finishing up academically. We still have a few players today who are finishing up tests. We'll know if we have any academic casualties in the next couple of days. Again, it was a good practice. We're going to go for the next three days, take off Sunday, and then we'll go most of next week before we send them home for Christmas. We'll meet the day after Christmas in Dallas.

"Nebraska is a good football team. Coach (Bill) Callahan has done a good job sticking with his philosophy. We watched some film from last year and this year. We noticed how much they have improved running the same offense that we run, with a lot of different formations. They run the ball first, and then throw it. They have a quarterback who is much improved and is really starting to understand the offense more and more. They have good running backs, a physical offensive line and athletic receivers. Defensively, again, they are a lot like us. They run a five-man front and a four-man front with quite a few coverages and they are very athletic.

"They had an excellent year. They made it to their championship game and obviously didn't win, but played very well at times. You can tell the improvement on that football team from last year to this year, with Callahan sticking with what he has been doing, what he wants to teach and how he wants the direction of the program to go. They are a very different team than what I saw back in the 1980s. I coached against them three times, I think. It is totally different. It's a smart move on their part getting a guy who really knows this type of offense and recruiting for it. It will only get better and better.

"There is a lot of tradition at Nebraska, a lot of national championships and a lot of bowl games. They have a very large fan base that really loves football. We are looking forward to a challenge. It will be a big challenge for us to play Nebraska. We are looking forward to playing a Big 12 team. We haven't had that opportunity in a while. I think our guys are really enthusiastic about playing a Big 12 team and going to Dallas, a different part of the country, and enjoying the bowl game."

"The Cotton Bowl is a special game. I can remember growing up, watching all the Cotton Bowls on television. It was one that was obviously left out of the BCS for some reason, but it has so much tradition and so many historical moments over the years that brings a lot of things back to college football that I can remember. It is also one of the better ones for the players and the coaches. Our team will enjoy this trip. The hospitality is outstanding. I told our football team, we're going to have a good time and enjoy it, but we're also going to be more focused, hopefully, than what we were mentally last year toward the bowl game. I don't know whether that will make any difference, but we're going out to try and play the best game that we have played all year.

"Hopefully, we'll have a few more guys healthy than we did during the season. It will be a challenge for us, but we want to try and get around 14 practices in for this game. We're going to do a lot of practicing with younger players, as we did today. At the end of each practice, a lot of guys who are redshirting or not playing will practice 30 or 45 minutes, working on basics and fundamentals. (We're) trying to get a jump on spring practice.

"We're going to move some guys around, as we did Bart Eddins today. We moved him to the offensive line. Is that going to be permanent? We'll have to wait and see. He'll be an inside guy, maybe a center or a guard. But again, we're just looking for some guys who might fit the mold of what we need on the offensive line with the graduation of several players. Most of these are experimental, and we'll see how they work out.

"Our players, as I said, practiced very well today. After being off for three weeks, the enthusiasm was there. They're excited about being finished with all of their finals. (They can) kind of relax a little bit; get back as a family, the team, working hard together. Its going to be a tough next six or seven days; practicing, lifting weights, running, doing the things that they need to do to get better.

"These next three days will be really nothing against Nebraska. They will be fundamentals of what we need to do: blocking, tackling, getting back to using our techniques, trying to get back into the groove of things. Monday and all of next week, we will work on our game plan, as we will when we get to Dallas.

"We've got a good senior bunch. We all know that this group set a record for how many games they won in their tenure here at Auburn. Forty wins sets a record, and they are looking to hopefully extend that. I'm proud of the seniors. I'm proud of what they have done and how they have done it. Their leadership is going to carry us through this bowl game. This is their last game with us. We want it to be a fun week, really two weeks.

"The seniors get to go to Birmingham tonight to what we call the Watch Banquet. They're awarded a watch in front of a 1,000 to 1,500 people. Its really our football banquet. Only seniors go. That will be tonight in Birmingham. It's another special night they can remember and take as part of their time here at Auburn. We appreciate the Jefferson County Auburn Club putting that on for us.

"We're not really talking much about what we're doing right now other than just trying to get our guys back in the groove of things, get back in the football mentality and finish up strong through next week, and then have a few days off for Christmas. We'll then going to Dallas and continuing to implement our game plan, which we already have prepared. We'll continue to put it in while in Dallas four or five days before the game.

On Auburn's health status...
"We all know we were beat up during the season. It was good to see Brandon (Cox) out there today and to not have to use a case of tape on him just to go through practice. It was also good to see Kenny Irons running around and enjoying practice other than just trying to survive. I'm sure we will have some guys beat up for the next few days as we are going to do a lot of contact and a lot of physical things in practice. To this point, we are as healthy as we were starting two-a-days back in August. We still have some guys who are a little but bruised up, but they are all practicing. We are going to push them pretty hard for an hour and a half, two hours every day. It is good to see them all back there and smiles on their faces other than just trying to survive a practice, getting ready for a game on Saturday."

On Auburn's redshirt players...
"Of all of our redshirt players, all of the guys who we signed last year, we didn't play very many. It's hard to name all of them. We have so many that we need to look at. Again, that is just basically just trying to get us ready for spring practice. We'll talk about those as we go along. I am going to watch the film, and I'll look more to the film of our younger players than I will what our older players did today. We mostly did all of that with our older players with timing and just getting back and working against each other. It's going to be pretty important for us to evaluate the next 12 or 14 practices with our young players trying to get them in the right positions for the March spring practice and trying to start putting the football team together for next year."

On the decision to redshirt most of the incoming freshmen...
"I talked to a lot of my cohorts across the country and saw quite a few of them in New York at the Hall of Fame a week ago. I talk about redshirting every year with the guys, and what they tried to do. Did you try to redshirt as many as you could? It's still the norm of everyone to try to do that. Most freshmen are not ready to play mentally. We had several this year who I thought could have helped us in the last four or five games. But do you want to sacrifice four or five games for an entire season? That is all of our struggles as we go into a season, looking at players. You really don't know how much time they are going to put forth during the season. We are still pushing for five years. We will continue to do that. That has been put in front of the American Football Coaches Association and (NCAA President) Myles Brand, and I think he is on our side now. Hopefully, we don't have to talk about redshirts much longer. Hopefully we can get that five years of eligibility. "

On player position changes other than Bart Eddins...
"We are still looking. I felt like today, just having enough guys to go through practice. That is the reason we moved (Eddins) over there. We might move someone else and move him back in the next four five practices. He was the first who we wanted to look at. We'll look at him all the way probably until we go to Dallas."

On Courtney Taylor and Jonathan Wilhite's health status...
"They are fine. Courtney is probably about 90 percent. He will be fine. He got banged around a little bit today, but he needed to. He probably won't be full speed tomorrow. Jonathan Wilhite just landed and has a sore back, but he'll be fine. Again, we are going to have some guys get beat up in the next week or so because we are going to do a lot of contact. Everyone is going to be involved in that, not just the younger guys. We are going to do as much as we possibly can to get ready to play a game after a two-month layoff, which is pretty tough, especially with the type of offense we run."

On the West Coast offense...
"The West Coast offense is hard. It is very mental. It starts with your quarterback. You have to have a guy who understands it and has to grow up in it. You can't bring a guy in one year and expect him to run it perfectly. You are going to take some hits, and you are going to make some mistakes. Then you go to your skill players. It is based on running the football first and throwing it second. There are a lot of mental things such as changing formations before the snap, and some of the audibles that you go through to change the play depending on coverages and alignments. The West Coast offense is not an offense that you put in with a new staff, and say you have to get in done in two or three years. It takes three or four years for your players to grow up in it, understand it and recruit for it. That is the reason I am pretty impressed with what coach Callahan has done in a short period of time."

On Auburn's assistant coaches being candidates for head coaching jobs...
"I think it's good. Most of these guys have grown up with me. They have been with me for 12 years. Al (Borges), of course, has not. He has been all over. The thing about our business is hopefully you want to be a head coach and run your own program. I want all of my guys to have that opportunity if they want to. We have some who really don't care to be head coaches. We have some who obviously think that one day they would like to branch out and maybe try to hire a staff and see if they can win games. I hope they have learned something from what we have done, and I think all of them have prospered from what we have done at Ole Miss and here at Auburn. I help them all I can. Head coaching jobs are hard. There are not many of them. They are hard to get, and they are hard to even get in on and have an opportunity of maybe being interviewed and have that chance. There are so many people trying to get a hand full of openings. I have tried to help them. I will continue to do that. It is really based on what you have done and your success. When you are an assistant, there are a lot of ifs, ands or buts. Athletic directors hiring you sometimes have a question mark of whether you can do the public relations work or the recruiting. There is a lot more to being a head coach than it is an assistant, either calling plays or calling defenses."

On the Cotton Bowl being his 100th game at Auburn...
"When I made 50, I thought that was pretty good. Now 100 is pretty good. I'm excited about what we've done here. We, obviously, haven't been perfect. Our program is getting better. This is a good year, a real good year in this conference, winning 10 games. That is really what everyone's goal is. If you win 10 games, normally you have an opportunity to go to the conference championship game. This year we had a lot of good teams in our league. We beat some, we lost some. That is the way it's going to go. I'm proud of our players. We have five more of our seniors graduating tomorrow. That is what it's all about. Sixteen or 17 guys will have graduated from this year. I'm proud of our coaches and players and the entire program that we have."

On the Cotton Bowl's early kickoff...
"We are going to have to get up early with a 10:40 a.m. kickoff. Really the early kickoff has nothing to do with it. Usually it's that team on the other side that has something to do with whether you win or lose. I wouldn't change much of what we did last year even when we played Wisconsin. We played against a team that played with a lot of emotion, and we didn't. We are going to try to prepare this year much the same way because we had very good practices. I want to get them to the game where they are mentally ready to play. I don't think we were as mentally ready as we could have been last year, because we might have pushed them too hard and practiced too long. We have evaluated all of it. Our guys are excited about going and playing against a very good football team with a lot of tradition in Nebraska. That will be challenging enough, much less worrying about the time."

On changing this year's bowl preparation compared to last year...
"We are going to let them sleep a little later. Last year we looked a little tired, and we got them up a lot earlier than what we are getting them up this year. We are going to practice more in the middle of they day. In Orlando, you could pretty much predict what the whether was going to be, so you could set your time table of when you were going to practice. We are going to be flexible in Dallas because of the weather. I've been there before. In 1991, we had to scrape the ice off the field every practice in Texas Stadium. You don't know what you are going to get. We are letting them sleep a little bit later for reasons that it is probably going to be a little colder plus the fact that we want to try to keep them fresher during the week's stay."

On last year's Capital One Bowl serving as motivation for this year's bowl game...
"We burned that film a long time ago. I watched it very quickly. Our players have heard a lot about it, and they understand. It's not another game, but it is another game. When it comes down to it, you are going and playing and you don't really worry about what you did last year, or what time the game is. You worry about yourself and try to get there with a good frame of mind, knowing that when you go to a bowl game, you play against a good team, because they also earned that right by how they played and were given the invitation because of they success that they had."