Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Change is uncomfortable.
I don't think I've worked a day in my life.
I moved seven times the first seven years I coached.
How do you play well? You practice well. You prepare well.
When you talk about the SEC, you never get a chance to rest.
At the end of the day, you have to go out on the grass and perform.
There's nothing worse than recruiting a player and then leaving the player.
I'm a big believer in your offensive limitations come from your quarterback.
I don't recruit against Nick Saban. I recruit for the University of Georgia.
It's very rare that Georgia and Alabama are the only two teams recruiting a kid.
A team is a group of young men playing together. The program is the entirety of that.
When your mom and dad read the paper, they like to know their sons are on the roster.
You've got to be diversified enough. That's the truth in the SEC and in college football.
I could finish my career being a defensive coordinator and say, 'Hey, he's Mickey Andrews.'
What you have success with, you feel comfortable with, you always rely on that a little bit.
It's very important that we don't make the same mistakes twice. That's a big part of improvement.
I always felt like, one of the niches is if you can recruit the SEC, you can be a head coach in the SEC.
Coach Saban's a great coach; he does it his way, and I have to do it my way. I have to cut my own cloth.
Let's be honest. Georgia, if you get the best players in this state, you should be winning championships.
I think in order to push kids and coach kids the way we want to coach them, we've got to have their trust.
It's never me against Saban, and I have too much respect for him to say that anyway. I never felt that way.
It's hard to say that it gets any better to be at your alma mater and run a major college football program.
The ultimate deal is: Are you winning and are you successful? The guys who've done that have had opportunities.
What I'm worried about is our team and our players developing and getting better. That's the most important thing.
Every young man that we want to bring here to the University of Georgia, we want them to graduate from this place.
Every kid I've been around as a football player, they want their coaches to make them better as men and as players.
It never stops. It's 365 recruiting. That cell phone you've got, these smartphones are the death of college coaching.
There's a lot of people who think in order to be a good head coach, you've got to be a head coach at a smaller school.
I might not have a conference championship or a national championship as a head coach, but I had the recruiting factor.
To be honest, it makes you a lot better coach when your boss is in the meeting room. You're a lot more driven every day.
I think the growth you get from working at a place like Alabama and with a program under Nick Saban, it helps me immensely.
When you step out there on the field as a corner in our system, you have to be ready to play because humility is one week away.
My goal is to outwork everybody in recruiting, sign the best players in the state, and turn these guys into the best team we can.
I think it's what's best for that kid. Are you going to teach that kid a lesson for 10 years down the road by suspending him a game?
The only thing that matters with my kids are them graduating and playing well, and I try to do my dangedest to get them to play well.
Coach Richt is a good friend of mine. I respect Coach Richt and worked for him for a year and respect the man he is and respect what he stands for.
Our personalities are the not the same, Coach Saban and I. And I have the utmost respect for what he's done and what he's done for me and my family.
It's a lot more important to get quality young men and good student-athletes that can be successful at the University of Georgia. That's my No. 1 goal.
We've got to recruit at the same level of the people who are winning titles and playing for titles, and to do that, we've got to have great facilities.
At the end of the day, if you're not beating the teams on the road recruiting that you have to beat on the field, then you're probably not going to win many championships.
I've been very fortunate to be with Coach Saban this long, learned a lot of football from him. It's been kind of the key to my personal success out of the places that I've coached.
I've got recruits that will text and call and do everything in the middle of the night. And I'm thinking, 'I'm with my family.' But you've got to dedicate time to that, or you can't do it.
To me, personally, my development to become a head coach will be much better working for Coach Saban than necessarily going somewhere else because you learn every day that you're in there.
I've seen Coach Saban over the years have to make a lot of tough decisions, and there's not one decision he doesn't make that he doesn't bounce ideas off the staff. To me, that's invaluable.
Every day I pull into that parking spot that says 'Head Football Coach,' I get out of my car and pinch myself sometimes, just to make sure it's real, sort of like, 'Is this really happening?'
Every college coach I talk to won't say it on record, but everyone's thinking, 'Should I go to the league?' Because you don't have the same requirements. It's different. The hours are different.
The amount of pressure that I've put on myself as a defensive coordinator for the last 10, 11 years, I really believe there's a lot more decisions that go into that position than the head coach.
If you chart SEC champions over a 20-year period, the one consistent thing to me is you're not going to win if you don't have a quarterback. It's too critical of a position. He decides something every play.
A lot of people think our standard is to be first in the SEC, be first in the country, first in our red zone, and run defense. We really don't go by that motto. We go by, 'Be the best Alabama defense there's been.'
Welcome to the world we live in as coaches. You've got to figure out what you can do best and better to get these kids a chance to be successful. I think that comes through a lot of things - confidence, improvement, recruiting.