Everything Rhett Lashlee said before SMU played East Texas A&M

SMU head coach Rhett Lashlee spoke with the media on Tuesday to preview the team’s season opener against East Texas A&M on Saturday. Here’s everything the coach of the Mustangs said.

Opening statement: “Game week’s here, we’re excited about that. East Texas A&M, Clint Dolezel, got a lot of respect watching their film for what he does. He was a really good multi-sport player there, played quarterback. So he’s at his alma mater. He was a great arena player. Coached here at Parish (Episcopal) High School for our very own Scott Nady, who just thinks the world of him. You watch them play on film, they play the game the right way. They play hard, they have good fundamentals. I think he’s doing a good job and excited to get to play them and really just play somebody else. We’ve kind of gotten to that point, which every year you’re to that point at this stage. But I think with us, with 42 of our 85 new guys, we really need to play someone else just to see where we stand. I think we got a long way to go. Just like they say in Eastbound and Down, ‘long way to go and a short time to get there.’ But we need to start playing somebody to see where we stand. We had a good fall camp. Relatively healthy, got a couple guys banged up, nobody too serious. Like I said, Saturday night, can’t get here fast enough.”

On importance of this game for getting ready for Baylor and rest of non-conference: “Yeah, I mean, every game matters in the playoff era. I think you look back to last year, the Nevada game was less ideal than we wanted it to be. It ended up helping us long run because we were able to win it. We want to get to 1-0 and get that good feeling. I think with us, you’re going to look at our depth chart, I think comes out later today. There’s a lot of things still unsettled, particularly with our two and three deep kind of world. Okay, on offense, for example, I don’t think you guys are going to be shocked by the 2-deep that comes out. But then you’re going to look at who’s behind those starters. It’s freshmen after freshmen after newcomer, you know. Same thing on defense. We have a lot of new faces playing, too, in the starting role on defense and so we just got to see how guys respond in that situation. Doesn’t matter who we’re playing. A game situation, you just can’t simulate it. I think back to last year we’re playing at Nevada we got a guy like RJ Maryland had like three busts the entire year and they all happened in that first game. Game 1s, they could come out and run totally different defense and totally different offense so could we, right? You never know what the opponent’s gonna do, you have an idea, but how guys respond with people in the stands, game on TV, you learn a lot. We have a lot of guys in new leadership roles that have been here. How they’re gonna respond, how they’re gonna handle that? We have a lot of guys that that we need to count on this year and again to your point our non-conference slate, we’re gonna have to count on (them) pretty quickly. I’m just anxious to see how our guys respond in a game situation. Is the moment too big for them? Where are we in that development so we know what we have to get better on real fast.”

On having Kevin Jennings back at QB for SMU helping settle things down in that regard: “You would think so. I mean, we got more guys returning on offense. You start thinking of Jordan Hudson and Romello Brinson and Matt Hibner and RJ Maryland. That’s veteran guys. You think of our O-line with Logan (Parr) and PJ (Williams) and even some of the new guys we brought in played a lot of ball and then of course Kevin (Jennings). So we have less new faces and most importantly, a quarterback. That gives you a lot of confidence that at least we kind of have an idea what our identity is, who we are and all those things. Now, we still gotta go out and execute and early in the season, how crisp are you and all that. But then to your question, yeah, you look at defense. We got two returning starters. Probably four or five guys returning that played almost as co-starters, but tons of new faces. I think it’s fair to say there’s more questions on defense based on who’s coming back. That’s another thing we’re anxious to see. How do we stop the run, how do we run to the football? How do we respond if they hit a big play? All those things that as you get week after week with a schedule like we have where there’s not a lot of weeks that you’re not playing a really, really good opponent that will hold you accountable if you don’t play well, that’s what we need to get out there and play and see what we’re made of.”

On the different expectations for Kevin Jennings this season: “Yeah, I think we all starting with Kevin, expect him to take the next step. We don’t expect him to be perfect, nobody is. The way he’s handled the offseason has been fantastic, both as a leader, both studying the game, the offense, physically, all those things. I just want to see him go play and can he continue to be the player we all know he is? And maybe at an even higher level and also lead our offense to value the ball better and do some other things we need to do. I think it’s also fair to say this is, and D’Eriq (King) will tell you this, and I think D’Eriq’s been good for him in this, it’s totally different going into the season and you have the entire January till now knowing you’re the guy. It’s just a different, I don’t even call it weight, it’s just a different feeling, right? So this is still a first for him. Did he start 11 games last year? So he’s got 12 starts in his career, so roughly a season. So it’s like a guy going into his second year, even though he’s been here a minute. There’s still a lot of new and a lot of growth to happen there. But man, I got ultimate confidence and Kevin, our team, has ultimate confidence. I just want him to continue to be Kev, it’s gonna be plenty good enough.”

On East Texas A&M: “I would think going into Year 2, similar staff in terms of defensive coordinator and all the things they’re doing, you expect them to be similar. Now they’re probably like us, they had the offseason and they go out. ‘Hey, how can we maybe be better? How can we do this better? Maybe we should do more of this, less of this. Our personnel’s changed.’ So there’ll be some wrinkles. That’s the thing about Game 1s, you usually get in the middle of the 2nd quarter before you kind of have an idea to confirm what’s happening in some cases. Stylistically, Clint himself offensively was a quarterback. He likes to push the ball vertically down the field. I think a lot like us, you’ll see his personality and what they do on offense. Then defensively, they’re multiple fronts. They base out of a 4-down, but they mix in some odd fronts, some Bear fronts. So you’ll see all the multiple fronts. They like to really take the air out of the cover. Similar to Pitt, if you were here last year, they’re gonna contest all the easy throws. They’re gonna make you make contested throws and get their safeties down in the run fits to stop the run and make you hit the low percentage throws and try to have an extra hat in the run game. 

“Again, like I said, the one thing that stands out when you watch someone else on film, how do they play? Well, their kids play hard, like they run to the football on defense. They’re physical. They play the game the right way. And so that’s why I said what I said at the beginning, I just think he’s doing a really good job. There’s a lot of unknown and that’s the hardest thing about Game 1s. There’s unknown on your opponent. Then there’s unknown on how, again, your guys, your new guys, and this new team will respond to things.”

SMU Offensive Depth Chart Preview

On if SMU having freshmen in the 2-deep is a reflection of recruiting ticking up: “Yeah, I think so. I think we still brought in a host of transfers, mostly still D-line, O-line, and then sprinkled elsewhere. But definitely at the skill positions, DB, receiver, running back, like even some potential linemen. I think it’s a credit to the fact that we’re in the ACC, we’re playing a different caliber of ball. We’ve had success that has attracted higher caliber kids out of high school. We’ve been able to kind of shift our focus more that way and not take as many transfers. If we’re gonna do that, and you’re gonna go out and get really good players to pick SMU over bigger programs like they did. Then they need to go out and play through their development maybe a little faster than we’ve been able to do in the past. No pressure on any of them, they’re all freshmen. You gotta have patience with it. But by the time we get through our first four games and have a bye week, and now you start getting into conference slate, they’re gonna have to grow up fast in those four non-conference games. We’re gonna probably see a lot of good and a lot of not so good. But we do believe in their talent, and we think those guys are gonna continue to get better and help us this year.”

On what he thinks will be a success for SMU in Week 1: “You look around the country, aside from the fact that it’s just particular, there’s a little usually sloppiness, penalties, turnovers. Just some of that on especially on the offensive side is guys just kind of trying to get things in rhythm, per se. You hope you see a lot of those sloppy things, maybe even minimized, you’re going to have some of it because, again, we just haven’t been in a game environment. Doesn’t matter, we have officials at practice, we’ve had ACC officials come do scrimmages. There’s still nothing like it. I hope it’s as clean as it can be. If it’s not, then we’ll know where we are and what we got to go clean up. Most important, I just want our guys to play fast. I want our guys on offense to play fast. I want our guys on defense. I want to see 11 guys running to the football. That’s what we’ve done the last two years, and that’s why we’ve been good. We swarm to the football. Obviously we’d love to be clean in the kicking game. I think that’s an area that’s a reasonable expectation. I want it to be as clean as possible, but I just want our guys to play hard. They make mistakes, let’s make them going fast. Let’s not be hesitant, let’s not be thinking. That’s on us as coaches, to not overload them to the point that they can’t do that, In particular, those young guys. Go play, to some degree don’t think. Just cut it loose and then we can correct some things from there.”

On what Rhett Lashlee learned from SMU being in the drama at the end of last year with the playoff committee: “Hopefully, my entire statement will be caught, not just snippets, but y’all know how that goes. First of all, I’m thankful they let us in, right? I think they had a hard job, and I’ve said it over and over. It’s a hard, hard job on good people. There’s good people on the committee, and it’s hard. There’s human element, and we’re, I mean, again, college football, college, baseball, basketball, but pro sports, you name them all, and even high school sports, there’s no pageants, there’s no contest. You never have coaches having to politic, shouldn’t we be in, should we be out? It’s you finish in this, you’re in, you don’t, you’re out. 

“In college, that’s what makes it unique. There is natural biases in our game. There’s biases in life, right? It’s the real world, especially when human element’s evolve. I’ll use Clemson as an example. I think a lot of schools have earned that. What Clemson has done over the last 10 to 12 years with Dabo, they have earned a reputation and a brand and a benefit of the doubt. They’ve earned it. You know what I mean? They’re gonna be ranked every year, and some years maybe higher than that. I think they should be No. 1 this year, but because of that reputation, they’re gonna get more of a benefit of the doubt of someone like us who hasn’t been doing it over the last 10, 12 years as long. Now, I feel like we’re growing. So that’s just part of it, you have to accept that.

“When it goes into the leagues, that’s tough. Because you hear about non-conference schedules. Well, our league plays more than anybody. We had a winning record against the Big Ten and the Big 12 last year. We beat the SEC more than any other league, yet the narrative at the end was we didn’t play hard enough non-conference schedules. I’ve still never understood how the ranked wins were. We were being told on that last day we didn’t beat anybody in the top 25, yet we went on the road and beat Louisville and they were ranked. We beat undefeated Pitt here by like four touchdowns and they were ranked. But for some reason later in the year, those don’t count. You know what I’m saying? Do they count when you beat them like they do in college basketball or they only count if they’re ranked at the end of the year and they decide to put Illinois in the top 25 instead of Duke? Or they decide to put Illinois instead of Louisville, which is a human decision. Those are the things that are just tough. Then you start hearing, well, is it this or this school? Again, a name brand that has earned it, like Alabama, you’re like, well, it’s probably gonna be tough. So I was really thankful they went on the merit of things because it doesn’t matter if you play in the ACC, the Big 12, the SEC, the Big Ten, every year some leagues are stronger than others. Think of the NFL, some years the NFC East is a bear and three teams get in and only one gets in out of the NFC West and the other years it flips and they don’t change the dynamics of everything because one year one league’s stronger than the other. It’s a tough job because it’s not balanced. You’re like well this team from this league versus this team from this league. How do I compare it? 

“There’s natural biases from leagues to teams and it just is what it is. What I learned from that experience is we have to and look, the way it went, we’re probably not getting the benefit of the doubt next time. We need to be clearly in, I would think, until we can create a brand here that we want to to where we get that benefit of the doubt. That’s what we want to get to here. I don’t think we’ve earned it yet, but as long as it’s a human system that stuff is is going to be part of it. What I learned is, for us in the ACC, we have to be just that much better to leave no room for doubt because Miami should have been in the playoff last year. That wasn’t hard, but they didn’t get in. But you know what, you could argue that the teams that did get in deserve to be in too. So where do you cut it off? Miami went to the Swamp and beat Florida pretty good last year, but no one was talking about that at the end. I think that’s just, it’s part of it and you have to accept that. There’s human elements involved and so there’s gonna be human results.”

On if SMU’s preseason ranking of No. 16 helps show they’re tracking the right way: “They (preseason polls) are (based on brands), and I think that shows that our reputation, we have earned the right to at least be thought of more favorably than we have in the past, it’s a great point. Here’s what’s funny, right? Like starting the year at 16 gives us a better chance than starting a year unranked, and it shouldn’t matter, right? It should be once they get to Week 8, it should be on merit. But we all know if we win and stay ranked, then we climb faster versus starting out. I think the fact that we were ranked 16th really doesn’t mean anything in terms of wins and losses, but it does show that the growth and the momentum of the program is going in the right direction. Can we maintain and sustain that is kind of where we are right now.”

SMU Defensive Depth Chart Preview

On having former SMU players like Craig James and Eric Dickerson around: “It’s vital. It’s vital to our program. I think it’s vital to every program, but it’s something that when we came back three years ago was a priority, is how do we get our former great players, whether they were from the 80s, like the guys you just mentioned like Eric, Craig, Jerry Ball, or the guys in the middle, the Kelvin Beachums, the Cole Beasley’s, the Emmanuel Sanders, the Margus Hunts, and then the more recent, the Courtland Suttons, the James Proches, Rashee Rice, those guys, this is their school. You heard Eric in the locker room last year after Florida State, there’s been some pride restored. They wanna come to the games, they wanna be proud to be a Mustang, but it helps when we’re representing better, right? Most importantly, we just want them to feel welcome. This is their home. We’re only here because they were here. It doesn’t matter if you were a Doak Walker in the 30s or if you’re those guys in the 80s, or probably the most valuable guys that nobody talks about, or the late 80s and the 90s guys who came back when the program was trying to come back. They took a lot of L’s, but they sustained us to get us back to here. We want all those guys to be around. We had a former player barbecue a week and a half ago on a Saturday that we always do, and we had over 300 former players here. My first year, I think we had like 50, you know what I mean? So to see that many guys wanting to come back, our staff does a good job, but it’s huge. It’s huge to us sustaining this success and continuing to build the program back up to what we all want it to be. We’re only here because those guys were here first.”

On how he keeps SMU focused despite the preseason ranking: “It’s a great question and to Tim’s question like, this is what we asked for. We wanted players on preseason watch lists. We wanted to be ranked in the preseason. We wanted high expectations because that means our program is growing in the right direction. How do we handle it? About to find out. I think we have a long way to go with this year’s team. I think this team has a lot of potential. I think we have a high ceiling. Also, again, I think we have a long way to go and like I said, a short time to get there. So how we handle it will be interesting because success is really hard. It’s hard to win 11 games back-to-back. I’ve said this. I know you’re tired of hearing it, but it’s the facts. It’s really hard to do that. It’s really hard to do it two years in a row. But it’s really hard to sustain that success. There’s a reason programs do this a lot. 

“We’re trying to build a consistent program that, are we gonna win the league every year? Probably not, but boy, that’s our goal. We want to be in contention as much as possible. Our goal is to get to that playoff every year. And our goal is to be ranked in the preseason and at the end of the season, more importantly, every year. All those things are what we’re trying to achieve. So we’re gonna find out how we handle success. To some degree, it’s a challenge with the team, especially the guys that were here. To another degree, it’s a brand new team. Like I said, half of them are new. So I mean, half of them may not even know we’re ranked if we don’t tell them, which is fine with me. This is a good year for our program because look, we want to compete to win the ACC and get back to Charlotte and get to the CFP. Our standard, our goals haven’t been lowered. It’s a new team. How do we continue to climb as a program? Success isn’t always directly linear, but this year’s a big year. How can we follow up last year? I think it’ll say a lot about kind of where we are and how much further we got to go to get where we want to be.”

On the pride he takes in recruiting Texas and playing Texas teams in the non-conference: “I don’t need all the credit for the schedule, cuz schedules get done a long time out in advance. Obviously, we played TCU for a long time. The Baylor game was put on the schedule, I think, probably four or five, six years ago, I’m not totally sure. Then playing schools like East Texas A&M, in the past, Lamar, Houston Christian, we need to help out schools in our state. The state of Texas, high school football is the best, and the college coaches are great. We all, I think collectively, wanna win more National Championships. So, we love playing those schools in the non-conference to some degree. You’re gonna see a shift too in the future of we still will be more than happy to play in-state schools. I think there’s a great part of the regionality of that, but we’re also looking to play national brands. 

“We’re fortunate to be the team here in Dallas, and so we wanna go out and schedule some — this Week 1 is just an incredible slate of college football, right? I think here in the next couple of years, we’re gonna be more in those Week 1 games. That’s where we’re trying to grow the program. When you play East Texas A&M, I know some former guys who played here have transferred or on that roster. We played Baylor Week 2, all these guys grew up playing against each other, were probably recruited by both schools. So there’s a lot of pride in that and I think it makes sense for fans. It makes sense for you all and it’s great for the game. The way the game is going, the regional piece is leaving us more. I would think most years we’ll play at least one or more schools from Texas just cuz we think it prepares us for what’s coming. Cuz football’s really well-coached and really well done in Texas both at the high school and collegiate level.”