John Lilly Quotations

We're in a learning process on how to deal with this.

When you think of college football, that's one of the games you think about right off the bat. Kids want to play in it.

When you talk about effects of (winning that game), in any one year it doesn't have that great of an effect,

We were an extremely young football team last year and played some freshmen, and we were hoping that would pay off. But we elected to just not talk a whole lot about last year.

Now, you've got guys who haven't even played a down in their junior year, and they're being ranked and they're being hammered about who they like, ... They're getting tired of it by the time their senior year rolls around.

We feel like if we can finish it off the right way, it will be another phenomenal year. That's the key, being able to put them together - one, two, three years in a row.

Here's a guy who is obviously not the ideal size, but we've found out a lot about his heart. I think that is something you always get when you get somebody from Madison County.

He's had the kind of spring he needed to have. He's made a lot of mistakes but that's what you learn from. Fundamentally, he's getting better. As far as assignments, he's getting better. Catching is something he hasn't done before. Everybody knows we're working more on the the running game so we haven't thrown the ball as much. But he's only had one day where he struggled catching the ball.

He's a very special athlete. He stepped up big for us.

He was loading Christmas trees. It struck me how college and football is so different from grinding it out in the real world. He had stayed in touch, and I knew that he had qualified. I was proud of him. I could tell by his voice that he was excited. He said, 'Coach, I can't wait to get started.' He had missed football.

Our game up there last year, we really started to see signs that we were getting better and our young kids were playing hard and learning how to play, ... I know everybody loves the worst-to-first (analogy), but last year was really just an uncharacteristically bad season for us.

Particularly when people look at the makeup of our team and some of the things we've been through, with playing more freshmen than anybody in America and having some really potentially, what could have been devastating, injuries. And then to be able to kind of pull it all together and still win the conference is a tremendous achievement for a team that I think most people felt like was probably a year away.

Our only security is our ability to change.

When you sign across the board at every position like we were able to do, you feel like you address your needs pretty well.

We probably are a little bit ahead of where we usually are at this time.

We fell probably one player short. I'll take responsibility for that. Sometimes with timing and the way you set things up.... sometimes you guess wrong.

You look at our classes every year and we've never gotten overly caught up in all of that. But as long as we get guys who fit in our system well and meet the needs that we have on our football team, we'll be pleased with that.

You start putting these last few classes together, and the quality that's in there, and we feel it has set us up for a pretty good run.

You don't want to get in a mode where you have to rebuild your team that way.

It's a great thing in recruiting, playing our first game on national television at a time when there is no other game. But I don't know if this game can get much bigger. Florida State and Miami kind of speaks for itself. Guys know if they want to be famous just make a big play in this game.

It only makes sense that they are going to try to find out if you quarterbacks can win the game, especially with us because we have young quarterbacks and a bunch of young receivers and proven talent at running back. It's a work in progress. At least we'll come out of the month of September having passed that test. Beyond that we'll wait and see.

I'm proud of them, it's been business as usual. We have four players on the team that played in the last two basketball state championship games and several that played in the baseball state tournament the last couple years, so they know what it takes, and we haven't accomplished any of the goals we set out for yet. It's just a reward for the first four games.

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true.

His (Madison County) high school coach did a great job of coaching him on the fundamentals of blocking. That's been an easy thing for him.

But if you can sustain a streak against somebody, I think it does have some effect. In a particular case where you've lost to somebody a few times in a row, you need to prove to people you can beat them.