Feb. 3, 2010
UNLV Head Coach Bobby Hauck
Signing Day Press Conference
2-3-10
"Obviously this is a great day around the country for football coaches. We get a chance to wrap up recruiting and we finally get to brag on these guys that you all have been reporting and talking about for numerous months."
"Today is a culmination of a lot of hard work. In our case it was a pretty frenzied effort over the last four weeks, because we took the job on Dec. 23. I am pleased with the results. Obviously every coach in America needs to be pleased with the results today, because if we didn't like them we wouldn't take them."
"I would like to tell everyone that is listening, thanks to our coaching staff, Ty Gregorak and Jimmy Morimoto are the guys who headed up our recruiting. Our coaching staff did a masterful job, I believe, in putting this class together in such a short time."
"In terms of the class, obviously it is oriented toward Nevada kids. That follows something I said the last time I stood at this podium about five weeks ago, that we were going to philosophically try and take every Nevada kid who we thought could help us win a championship, and go elsewhere to supplement that. I think we put our money where our mouth was, to a degree. Obviously that is a bit of a hot-button point, year-in and year-out with local kids. We want to evaluate every local kid and either feel good about taking them or trying to convince them to stay here. And the guys that we do not offer, we need to feel good about them going elsewhere. The evaluation of the local guys is first and foremost and it will remain so."
"The other part of it is, there are some kids that are going to get away from us that we want. It is America, they get to make the choice for themselves, but we certainly will put our best foot forward, and sell UNLV, this city and this university hard to the local guys. With eight of those guys signed, that was a really good job by our assistant coaches."
"The other thing we did was we went to Texas and got four kids. When I initially took the job, I didn't think that was going to be a real productive place for us to go and recruit but it certainly turned out to be. I like those four kids. Those four kids from Texas are a pretty special bunch. We got some speed, we got a quarterback out of Texas and we got a linebacker who is very versatile."
"The rest of the guys came from California, Spokane and Denver, and when you look at this class you are going to see some stature. One of the things we are into are guys that have some framework that they can build on. If you look at the heights on these guys, there are not a lot of shorter players. If the kid is short, he needs to have some special gifts in terms of our recruiting evaluation."
"Obviously in recruiting things change rapidly, as they did the last couple of weeks for us, but this is a pretty well-put-together class."
"It is a good bunch. Physically, if you lined them up here next to me, you would like the looks of them. I am big on that when guys get off the bus I like to look up at them, I don't like to look down at them. I will be looking up at most of these guys. They can all run and they are good kids."
"If I could have changed one thing over the last five weeks I would have made each day 28 or 30 hours rather than 24 because we have been going at it pretty hard."
"We have exhausted about every minute we could spend researching these guys. I think they are of high character, as well as good on the football field. I am pleased, but as I said if a guy is standing up here and he isn't pleased, he better lie about it, because this is the day to be happy about them, and I am."
"One of the big question marks I had when I took the job was to see how receptive people would be to us in this recruiting class and they were very receptive and very open to listening to what we had to say. Frankly, I am excited about what we can do next year with a whole year to work on it."
