Somehow I missed this yesterday. I’m sorry. I do have to say I told you so. But anyway, thank you Tommy, I love you, may I have your baby, I mean….good job.
| Auburn’s Tommy Tuberville addresses rumors |
Here’s the full text from the press conference if you can’t watch the video (thanks to Evan Woodberry):
One thing I want to talk about — and I don’t talk about rumors that much, but over the last week or so, obviously, there’s been a lot of things said in the papers or magazines or whatever. I get people (who) e-mail me that.
I just want to let everybody know that everything is going good. I did not have a stroke. I am completely healthy. As a matter of fact, about three months ago I had a full physical.
I’m not tired of coaching. I’m fired up as ever. You know, I’ve been here 10 years as head coach, this is my 30th year to coach, and I feel as good right now as I ever had about coaching football and young guys. I still have that drive. You pretty much have to (with) 14-, 18-hour days this time of year. I read that my drive was gone.
No, we did not negotiate a contract last week. That’s another one that came out. I don’t like recruiting anymore. Well, I went 2500 miles last Thursday and Friday and covered a lot of high schools and talked to a lot of coaches and I loved every minute of it. Our recruiting is going great.
It’s just amazing the rumors that go around when things are not going as good as you would hope. No matter what happens anywhere, you’re going to have years that things are not going to go perfect. That’s my job to get it straightened out.
The one thing I will tell you about our football team is that will all these distractions from the outside, I can tell more about our football team when things go like this then I do at any other time. A good football team is made from within, not from without. We’ve got some great kids on this team that have busted their tail and they have hurt immensely. And you should as much time and effort as they put into it.
Every fan out there, you can put them together. They really love their football and I’m proud of that. But you can put every fan together and it wouldn’t come near the hurt that it hurts one of these kids to lose a football game, the effort and time they put into it. I’m proud of it.
I just wanted to let you know. I’ve been here 10 years. I plan on being here 10 more. I’m looking forward to it. All these rumors get started. I’m 10 years an Auburn man and I’m 10 years more of an Auburn man than most because I put my heart and soul in this thing and we ain’t going to stop now. We’re going to keep working and striving to get better because we do have a good football team.
We’re not playing good right now. This is a transition year but we’re going to get better. I don’t know whether we’ll win any of these last five games but I’ll tell you one thing, all you got to do is look back at the first seven. We led every game at halftime. Some things didn’t work out in the second half but we fought hard in every game. We played well. We hadn’t been beat by 30 points. There’s time when you’d think we’d lost that game by three or four touchdowns and it came down to basically the last play or so.
That’s just this football team. I’m proud of how they’ve worked, how they put it together. The coaches, how they’ve done it. Good football teams don’t win every game. I’m looking forward to the next few weeks and seeing how much we improve.
We put in seven principles of what we want to do for the next five games in terms of winning. We’re going to base this football team on that. Your football team is based on more than how they play on Saturday. I base them on a lot more things around the program, how they handle themselves, how they do things, classes, all those things together. And we’re going to have some guys get in trouble. We’re not perfect but we take care of those problems.
We’ve got a great program here that’s going to get stronger, that’s going to get better. All the detractors from outside that keep throwing stones at us, that’s fine. I love it. It makes us work harder.
So we’re looking forward to this Thursday, coming back this weekend getting ready for the next conference game the next week and on and on.
Again, I appreciate the sympathy cards for my illnesses and all that but please don’t send any flowers. Save your money til Christmas. It looks like the way the economy is you’re going to need it.
That’s a paid political announcement by Tommy Tuberville, by the way. Now we can get on with it after dispelling all those things.
