Oct. 14, 2008
Head Coach Steve Spurrier met with the media for his weekly press conference Tuesday afternoon in the Crews Building team room. Below are some excerpts from his press conference:
Opening Statement
We’re looking forward to Saturday night’s game at 8 p.m. The defending national champs LSU come to town and like I mentioned earlier they obviously are still in contention with only one loss in the SEC. If you lose outside the division it doesn’t hurt you that much. That’s where they are and several teams are sort of in that position – Florida, Georgia and Vandy.
We’re looking forward to the game. We’re very healthy right now, as far as most teams in the country. We’ve been very fortunate. Our strength and conditioning staff – Mark Smith and his guys – deserve a lot of credit for the way we’ve remained injury free.
I know our fans will be fired up and ready to go as always. We’ll try our best to play our best game of the year Saturday night.
On Tommy Bowden
I was a little bit surprised it happened but that’s really all I need to say. I have enough issues here trying to score some touchdowns and things like that that I don’t need to get involved in that.
On Dion Lecorn’s move to defense
Dion went over to safety yesterday. Coach Cooper was looking for someone to try to train over there in case of injuries. Dion has not performed all that well at wide receiver the last few weeks so now he’s trying to play defense. We wish him the very best and hope he can help us over there.
On Florida routing LSU last week
I’ve seen those kinds of things happen when you get on top of a team in your home ballpark. With the speed that those Florida ball players have when they get lose, nobody’s going to catch them. They had a big offensive game. Their defense played well and they ran the ball extremely well. It was surprising. Most people thought it would be a toss-up game going in.
On Heath Batchelor and the offensive line
Heath Batchelor is suspended for a violation of team policy. It puts Lemuel Jeanpierre in the game more with Terrence Campbell and Jamon Meredith. All three should play. They’re about the same in there so all three should play.
On wide receiver play
Jason Barnes has come around the last two games. He’s got a game ball each of the last two. He had some big catches in both to help us win the game. Kenny’s back, Jared Cook and Weslye. Joe Hills has come around better. We’re a little encouraged with our wide receiver play. It has a lot to do with if the quarterback can hit them when they’re open, but they’re getting open better.
On Stephen Garcia
We thought he had a lot of potential and he still does. He can throw the ball beautifully as we found out last week. He can move around it bit. It was encouraging, he actually checked out two receivers.
We go pretty much week by week until guys prove themselves and we go from there…it is what it is. We give them all the opportunity to go play. If it doesn’t work out, we give the next guy the opportunity to go play. We all gained a lot of confidence out of his performance last week, but again it’s just one game.
The offense is getting better. We’re not punting much. We’re (converting) a lot of third downs. We’re just not getting a lot of touchdowns.
This is a key game for us. LSU is sort of the big name team as we know. What we’re really trying to do this week is talk about playing the best we can, not so much worry that we’re playing the defending national champ and the team has tremendous history. If we play our game, play well and take care of the ball I believe we’ll be right in there with these guys.
On Ryan Succop
He was out kicking fine yesterday. He just missed, that’s all you can say. Once he missed one, it’s like putting. `Well I missed one to the right so now I need to pull left.’ Kickers just can’t have a memory.
We’ve won by a touchdown and lost by a touchdown in every conference game. Hopefully one day we’ll get to the point where we can (win) by three touchdowns.
