Notebook: Week 7 Press Conference – Texas A&M Athletics

Jimbo Fisher’s opening statement:

Off week last week came at a good time. Got your nicks and nacks, and guys getting healthy. We had some good practices, got back to some fundamental work, worked on some future opponents and South Carolina, plus other things. 

South Carolina is a very good football team. Playing very well right now, they’re 4-2. They’re doing a great job in all three phases of what they’re doing. They have experience on defense up front. Pickens and Birch up front, plus their D-line, do a great job. Backers are active. Secondary does a really good job. Spencer Rattler’s doing a good job at quarterback. The running back, No. 1, can really run the ball. He’s running really, really hard. Receivers are making plays. Experienced offensive line. Special teams always does a great job. They’ve blocked five punts on the year. Good returners, good kickers, those type of things. South Carolina is always a very tough place to play. Great atmosphere over there, great environment, especially being a night game. So they’ll be juiced and ready, and we need to be able to bring our A-game, be able to play well and finish out the second half of the season and play good football.

Week 7 Press Conference Quotables:

• On Haynes King’s status: “He’s going.”
• On Haynes having a better game against Alabama than he did in the season’s first two: “Well, in the first game, he had a mistake or two. And in the second game, he could have made some plays at the end, but there were a lot of plays he made early in the game that didn’t have (anything) to do with him, that other people need to finish up. And like you see now, we’re all a byproduct of the people around us in how we play, especially at quarterback. I mean, what are we saying right now? The two greatest quarterbacks maybe of our era, Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers, have the lowest QB ratings or the lowest win records or lowest whatever. I mean, you have to play well, but my point is it shows you those two is as good as anybody in my time…but you’ve got to play well around them for them to be able to function and do things. And then in time, as they get older and more experienced, they learn to, as I say, clean up the messes of other people more and more. It’s still a team game, you know what I’m saying? But I think he’s grown, he’s matured and he’s practicing. And he took that time off, he didn’t pout, he worked on getting better knowing that if he got another opportunity he…