Feb. 1, 2006

ON THE 2006 CLASS:
"We looked for guys who love the game of football. Guys who are high in character. We wanted guys who were physically tough. Also guys who expected to win and knew how to win. We ended up finding several guys from winning programs."

"We are in the process of turning this football program around and we are working hard to do that. There are two ways to do that, basically. You have to change the culture from within that program and we are in the process of doing that. You also need to add new talent and new blood from the outside."

"I think we have a really good mixture in this class of guys who are going to play right away and also guys who are going to develop and build for the future."

ON HIS RECRUITMENT OF POLYNESIAN PLAYERS:
"One of the things that I believed going into this job when I was hired was that I wanted to recruit Polynesian players. We had a strong presence in the islands of Hawaii and Samoa as well as with Polynesian players in the mainland."

THE EMPHASIS ON OFFENSIVE AND DEFENSIVE LINEMEN:
"I think one of the things that is really important when you look at offensive and defensive schemes, and you get excited about style offense, is that the important thing to realize is that football games are won at the line of scrimmage."

"With that in mind we recruited heavily in the offensive and defensive lines. That has been a huge priority for us and we ended up with a combination of 13 offensive and defensive linemen. We want to be able to dominate the line of scrimmage and we want to be a physical football team up front."