BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - Let the 2012 college football season begin.
Nothing is crazier in college football than the Southeastern Conference's Media Days. Coaches and players sit in the hot seat, taking questions from journalists across the country. The inaugural season in the SEC starts September first against Southeastern Lousiana. Mizzou opens SEC the next weekend against Georgia in Columbia.
Here's the transcript of Head Coach Gary Pinkel's hot seat moment, courtesy of the SEC & the University of Missouri:
Good afternoon. Certainly excited to be here at our first SEC pre-season press conference here. Appreciate you all being here.
We're excited about obviously joining the league. There's been a transition that's taken place, will take place probably for some time to come, certainly different areas of it. We've been working hard since January in our preparation for the football season. Our players have been working very hard this summer. We'll get going August 1st and start our practices, then hopefully we can play our best football when we get to September 1st. Excited about being a part of this great league, and understand, too, when you go into a league like this, you're new, you have to prove yourself, earn respect, and that's what we're going to work hard to do.
We'll take questions now.
Q. You were mentioning about earning respect. Is there a fine line of telling your guys, "Let's go out and play, this is a tough league, let's don't be intimidated?"
I'd be disappointed if we were intimidated. We played in a pretty good football league ourselves. We understand the great league we're coming into. It's all going to play out. We all know how it works. It's in the process. How is Missouri and Texas A&M going to do in the SEC, there's going to be an analysis every single week.
You have to go out and play and compete. That's the way it should be. It's going to be decided on the football field. We're excited about doing that.
Q. Do you look at the Georgia game, put any extra emphasis on it, as a chance to earn that respect? Do you think people undersell the Big 12?
Everybody is going to analyze that the way they want. I'm not going to try to come up here and prove ourselves and that we play in a pretty good football league. You'll all have your opinions on that, that's fine.
Q. Talk about recruiting, not specific about players, but joining the SEC, do you look at the offense and defense and start on that basis in recruiting just to match up with the other teams because the SEC is so dominant on both lines?
I think anyplace you play, any league you play in college football, I think your best teams are going to be if you're good up front on offense and defensive line, you have a chance to compete at the highest level. In the Big 12, when I coached years ago in the PAC-10, wherever I was, generally the teams that were most physical up front were the teams that competed for the highest prize that particular year for a championship.
I don't think it's any different than this league. We recruit how we recruit. We're not doing anything different in terms of player development. We understand that. We understand the offenses are considerably different I think overall in this league as compared to what we played in the Big 12. That's all analysis of schemes, offense, defense, kicking all personnel.
Part of the transition is we have all these teams we never played before. We have reports and analysis written up on every single team that we're playing, there will be just a lot more this year because we're playing in a different league.
I think all those things will sort themselves out.
Q. You're in your 12th year at Missouri, but first year in the SEC. Talk about what that is like. How big is the stability of you and your staff going into a new conference?
Certainly staying in one school for 12 years, then all of a sudden switching leagues, that's probably historic in itself. How many college coaches could say that could ever happen? The transition has been significant for me. We're doing things we never thought we'd be doing in this transition that's taking place and will continue to play takes. But yet I think the continuity of our staff has been important. We have a system in place. Are we changing how we recruit? No. Do we change how we train our players? No. We believe in what we do. Certainly we'll be tested. That's fine. That's how it should be.
Anybody that has done any analysis of our staff probably know I've had as consistent a staff as anywhere in the country. I got great coaches that have had opportunities to leave and they've stayed. That continuity has been tremendously important for us to build our program at Missouri, and I think it will be tremendously important for us as we expand our recruiting areas certainly into SEC country, into Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, so on and so forth. I think that continuity will help carry us through there in a positive way.
Q. You obviously go back with Nick Saban quite a bit. Can you tell us what he was like in college and what kind of relationship you have now?
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