

But you have to do the things necessary throughout the week to put yourself in position to do that. Everybody is pushing toward a common goal, which is playing better football, which is ultimately coming out victorious. Our scout team players have given a great look this week. Not just from our frontline starters, I feel it from everybody across the board. I think coming out of that meeting Monday, the players-only meeting on Tuesday, I feel the sense of urgency. On if there’s a sense of urgency at practice: “Yes, I do feel real sense of urgency. Is Quinn Ewers starting?: “Valid question, I understand. With all that, I think he’s in the right mental state of mind of wanting to get back out there, staying engaged, and doing the things necessary that we’re asking him to do.” We want to make sure that we’re doing what’s in the best interest of Quinn, but also our team. He’s been throwing for about 2.5 weeks and has gradually improved. He’s worked at trying to get himself healthy. Mentally, he’s a highly competitive young man. He’s wanted to play since he first got injured at Alabama. On Quinn Ewers: “I think there’s no doubt Quinn wants to play. I thought that was a great sign they were willing to take that initiative and do that.” Then Tuesday morning, they had a player-only meeting where the leadership committee addressed some of the things that I talked about where we can improve. On leadership this week: “What I was proud of with those guys was coming out of the ballgame last week, Monday they had a leadership council meeting. I credit our team a lot for putting in the work this week and coming back to work with a real sense of intent and a real sense of motivation knowing that this is a really big ballgame to get on the board in Big 12 play, to get to 1-1, against a really good opponent.” We didn’t play quite the way we expect to play, but we could all be sitting here at 4-0 acting like it’s sunshine and rosy out, and we’d still be wanting to work on things to get better. I think the noise around our team is the sky is falling, and ‘what happened to Texas,’ and ‘we’re not very good.’ We’re still a pretty good team, things just didn’t quite go the way we wanted them to go. As we’ve reminded ourselves, we obviously always want to play better and we know we can play better, but it is a little unfortunate we’ve had a couple of heartbreaking losses here two of the last three games with field goals at the end, one at the end of the game against Bama and obviously the overtime loss there at Tech last week.

On this week: “We’ve had a really good week of work.
